Ratnasambhava

Ratnasambhava (Jewel-Born) is one of the Five Buddhas, the Dhyani or Wisdom Buddhas, of Vajrayana Buddhism, the scheme in which five celestial Buddhas embody five aspects of enlightenment arranged across a mandala. Ratnasambhava presides over the southern quarter and the Jewel (Ratna) family, is yellow or gold in colour, and is associated with the earth element.

The defilement he transmutes is pride, which in his wisdom becomes the wisdom of equality (samata-jnana), the insight that sees all beings and things as equal in their fundamental nature; his emblem is the wish-fulfilling jewel and his characteristic gesture the varada mudra of giving, marking his link with generosity and abundance. He is a figure of meditation and visualization rather than of narrative myth, encountered chiefly in tantric ritual, in the mandala and in art. The scheme of the Five Buddhas in which Ratnasambhava takes his place is set out in the Sarvatathagatatattvasamgraha, an eighth century tantra foundational to the later Yoga and Anuttarayoga classes of Vajrayana practice, where the five figures are arranged as a mandala of transformed afflictions rather than as a historical narrative; because tantric systems assign consorts and positions somewhat differently from text to text, Ratnasambhava's paired dakini is not fixed identically across every lineage, a variability characteristic of tantric literature generally rather than a sign of confusion in any single tradition.

The now-common English label Dhyani Buddha, used loosely for Ratnasambhava and the other four buddhas of the mandala scheme, traces back to a specific historical figure: Brian Houghton Hodgson, a British colonial official who served for many years in the early nineteenth century as the East India Company's Resident in Kathmandu, and who used his diplomatic posting to undertake one of the earliest serious Western scholarly investigations of Newar Buddhism, the distinctive form of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism preserved among the Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley.

Hodgson collected an enormous number of Sanskrit and Newari Buddhist manuscripts, many of which he sent to libraries and scholars in Europe, effectively supplying much of the primary textual material on which the earliest generation of Western Buddhology was built, and in the process he introduced terminology, including Dhyani Buddha, to categorize concepts that did not map neatly onto existing European religious vocabulary.

Subsequent scholarship has noted that Hodgson's terminology, however useful as an entry point, does not always correspond precisely to how these figures are named within the traditions themselves, and specialists today generally prefer more precise, tradition-internal terms, the Five Tathagatas or the Sanskrit and Tibetan names, over Hodgson's nineteenth century coinage. That the most familiar English term for a figure as central to tantric visualization as Ratnasambhava originates not from any Buddhist source but from a British diplomat's attempt to translate an unfamiliar system for a European audience is a reminder of how much modern vocabulary for Asian religious traditions was shaped by the sometimes idiosyncratic choices of early colonial-era scholars.