Transmission and Authenticity
According to scholars specializing in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra, the history of the text is extremely complex, but the consensus view is that the core portion of this sutra corresponding to the Tibetan translation, the six juan Chinese translation attributed to Faxian and the first ten juan of the Dharmakṣema Chinese translation was compiled in the Indian sub-continent, possibly in Andhra, Southern India.
According to early Chinese sutra catalogues such as the Lidai Sangbao ji (歷代三寶紀), a part of the core portion of the sutra was translated previously into Chinese by Dharmarakṣa (fl. c260-280), though this version is now lost.
According to Faxian's own account, the manuscript copy forming the basis of the six juan Chinese version was obtained by him in Pāṭaliputra from the house of a layman known as Kālasena, during his travels in India. Though the translation of this six juan version is conventionally ascribed to Faxian(法顯), this attribution is probably inaccurate. Written less than 100 years after the date of this translation, the earliest surviving Chinese sutra catalogue, Sengyou's Chu Sanzang Jiji (出三藏記集), makes no mention of Faxian, but instead states that the translation was done by Buddhabhadra and his assistant Baoyun (寶雲). Sengyou quotes still earlier catalogues to corroborate this attribution. The idea that Faxian was involved in the translation only emerges in later catalogues, compiled several hundred years after the event.
Chinese canonical records also mention that a now lost translation was made by the Chinese monk Zhimeng who studied in India from 404-424 CE. According to Zhimeng's own account, he also obtained his manuscript from the same layman in Pataliputra as Faxian did some years earlier.
The surviving data for the translation done by Dharmakṣema from 421CE onwards in Guzang is somewhat confused and contradictory. However, based on the earliest biographical material, such as the account of his life given by Sengyou and Huijiao's "Record of Eminent Monks" (高僧傳 T2059), it seems that Dharmakṣema brought with him a birch-bark manuscript of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra from North-Western India, which he used for the initial translation work of his version. This is stated to have formed the basis of the first ten juan of his translation, known to correspond overall in content to the six juan version and the Tibetan version.>
However, Dharmakṣema's translation of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra extends for a further thirty juan beyond the accepted core text of this sutra. The provenance and authenticity of the Sanskrit text, if such existed, underlying this part of his translation has been debated amongst scholars for decades, with many doubting that it is a text of Indian origin. The chief reasons for this skepticism are these: no traces of a extended Sanskrit text has ever been found, while Sanskrit manuscript fragments of twenty four separate pages distributed right across the core portion of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra have been found over the past hundred years in various parts of Asia; no quotations are known from this latter portion in any Indian commentaries or sutra anthologies; and no other translator in China or Tibet ever found Sanskrit copies of this portion. The Chinese monk-translator Yijing travelled widely through India and parts South East Asia over a twenty-five year period. In his account of "Eminent Monks who Went West in Search of the Dharma" (大唐西域求法高僧傳 T2066), he mentions that he searched for a copy of the enlarged Mahaparinirvāṇa-sūtra through all that time, but only found manuscripts corresponding to the core portion of this work. For these reasons, textual scholars generally regard the authenticity of the latter portion as dubious: they surmise it may have been a local Central Asian composition at best or else written by Dharmakṣema himself who had both the ability and the motive for doing so. As a consequence, specialist scholars accept that this latter portion of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra translated by Dharmakṣema has no value for the history of the tathāgata-garbha concept and related doctrines during their development in India.
Read more about this topic: Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra