The defining characteristic of the “five－gotra system” (wuxjng geble 五姓格別) of the Faxiang 法相school in China is that it includes sentient beings who can never attain Buddhahood. This idea was difficult for Chinese and Japanese Buddhists to accept, for they had adopted the Yogacara system and modified it in a way suited to the Chinese on the basis of Tathagatagarbha thought, which maintains that allsentient beings have the potential for Buddhahood, i.e., everyone without exception can become a Buddha. According to the principle of observing daily life as it really is, found in Indian Buddhism, it is, however, understandable that Indian Buddhists should have made mention of those who have no possibility of attaining Buddhahood. When we search for the origins of the five－gotra system in India, we notice that there are, broadly speaking, two lineages. One is that of the three-Vehicle system, where by the Mahayanists tried to demonstrate their superiority over traditional Buddhists. The other of the pragmatic norms in which, from an educational standpoint rooted in actual daily life, the Buddhist community enacted provisions for dealing with the event that a yogin might lose the possibility of becoming a Buddha. In this paper I confine myself to an examination of passages dealing with sentient beings who can never attain Buddhahood (aparinirvana-dharma) in the Yogacarabhumi, the basic text of the Yogacara school. An examination of these passages reveals that the Chinese translation by XuanZang 玄奘 is strictly faithful to the original text. It can be readily imagined that elite scholar monks at the translation centre who had been educated in the Yogacara system and understood it on the basis of Tathagatagarbha thought would have reacted against Xuanzang's interpretations when translating the Yogacarabhumi from A.D. 646 to 648. These adverse reactions would have awoken in him a desire to demonstrate the justification for aparinirvana-dharma in the form of the five－gotra system in his translation of the Buddhabhumivyakhya in A.D. 649. We cannot find any passages about the five－gotra system in the extant original text ascribed to Silabhadra, which has survived only in Tibetan translation. Xuanzang successfully incorporated the aparinirvana-dharma system as the fifh gotra, i.e., agotra, in the three-vehicle system. In order to ascertain these circumstances, in this article I compare Xuanzang's Chinese translations with the original passages dealing with this subject in SanSkrit (or Tibetan translation).
