Jan Nattier

PersonType	Category:Authors of English Works Category:Translators Category:Professors
FirstName / namefirst	Janice
LastName / namelast	Nattier
namemiddle	J.
MainNamePhon	Jan Nattier
bio	Jan Nattier is an American scholar of Mahāyāna Buddhism. She earned her PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies from Harvard University (1988), and subsequently taught at the University of Hawaii (1988-1990), Stanford University (1990-1992), and Indiana University (1992–2005). She then worked as a research professor at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University (2006–2010) before retiring from her position there and beginning a series of visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S. Nattier is one of a group of scholars who have substantially revised views of the early development of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the last 20 years. They have in common their attention to and re-evaluation of early Chinese translations of texts. Her first notable contribution was a book based on her PhD thesis which looked at the Chinese Doctrine of the Three Ages with a focus on the third i.e. Mofa (Chinese: 末法; pinyin: Mò Fǎ) or Age of Dharma Decline. She showed that the latter was a Chinese development with no India parallel. The translation and study of the Ugraparipṛcca published as A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā) in 2003 also contained an extended essay on working with ancient Buddhist texts, particularly in Chinese. Nattier's notable articles include a study of the Akṣobhyavūhya Pure Land texts, which asserts the early importance of this strand of Mahāyāna ideology; an evaluation of early Chinese Translations of Buddhist texts and the issue of attribution (which summarises several earlier articles on the subject); and a detailed re-examination of the origins of the Heart Sutra (1992), which proposes that the sutra was composed in China. Nattier was married to John R. McRae (1947-2011),[ a professor and researcher who specialized in the study of Chinese Chan Buddhism and was the author of The Northern School and the Formation of Early Chan Buddhism (University of Hawai`i Press, 1986) and Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (University of California Press, 2003). (Source Accessed Jan 11, 2021)
phduniversity	Harvard University
education	PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Harvard University, 1988
IsInGyatsa	No
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Full Name

Janice J. Nattier

Mahāyāna, or the Great Vehicle, refers to the system of Buddhist thought and practice which developed around the beginning of Common Era, focusing on the pursuit of the state of full enlightenment of the Buddha through the realization of the wisdom of emptiness and the cultivation of compassion.

A person who seeks enlightenment for the sake of others. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, a Bodhisattva is a compassionate being who is training on the path to Buddhahood and aspires to eliminate the suffering of all beings and take all sentient beings to the state of enlightenment. The Mahāyāna sūtras including those on buddha-nature generally have Bodhisattvas as the main audience or interlocutors for the Buddha's discourses.