Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma
The sūtras which focus on the doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) like the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra corpus, are considered to comprise the "second turning" (which in this schema is considered provisional), and the sūtras which teach Yogācāra themes (especially the three natures doctrine), like the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, comprise the final and ultimate "third turning".
[9] The Abhidharma teachings of the various śrāvakayāna (i.e. non-Mahayana) traditions (such as Vaibhasika and Theravada) are generally also placed into this category.
[5] In East Asian Buddhism, the second turning is referred to as "the teaching that the original nature of all things is empty, that signs are not ultimately real" (無相法輪).
[1] Major ideas in this text include the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna), and the doctrine of cognition-only (vijñapti-mātra) and the "three natures" (trisvabhāva).
The Saṃdhinirmocana affirms that the teachings of the earlier turnings authentic but are also incomplete and require further clarification and interpretation.
[15][16][17][18] The teachings of the third turning are further elaborated in the numerous works of Yogācāra school masters like Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, Dharmapāla, Śīlabhadra, Xuanzang, Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnākaraśānti.
In his Commentary on Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes (Madhyāntavibhāga-bhāṣya), Vasubandhu comments on the three turnings and how they relate to the three natures.
1830), Kuiji (a student of Xuanzang), lists the following as the most important sutras for the Yogācāra school:[20][21] In Chinese Yogācāra, important treatises for the third turning included the Yogācārabhūmi-śastra, Xuanzang's Cheng Weishi Lun, and the Daśabhūmikasūtraśāstra (Shidi jing lun 十地經論, T.26.1522, also called Dilun), which is Vasubandhu's commentary on the Daśabhūmika-sūtra (Shidi jing 十地經).
The translator Paramārtha (499-569 CE) was known for promoting this syncretic Yogācāra and for defending the theory of the "stainless consciousness" (amala-vijñāna), which is revealed once the ālaya-vijñāna is purified.
As noted by Jan Westerhoff, the identification of buddha-nature teachings with the Yogācāra's third turning happened not only because several sutras (like the Laṅkāvatāra) explicitly synthesized the two doctrines, but also because:the notion of the tathāgatagarbha lines up more naturally with the characterization of ultimate reality we find in Yogācāra than with what we find in Madhyamaka.
[26]Due to the influence of Yogācāra-Tathāgatagarbha thought, some Buddhist traditions also consider the tathāgatagarbha (also known as buddha-nature) teachings as part of the third turning.
For example, the Jonang master Dölpopa Shérap Gyeltsen (1292-1361) held that the Tathāgatagarbha sutras contained the "final definitive statements on the nature of ultimate reality, the primordial ground or substratum beyond the chain of dependent origination.
[30] The teachings found in several of the "treatises of Maitreya", such as the Madhyāntavibhāgakārikā, Ratnagotravibhāga and the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga are also considered to be part of the third turning by several schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
[8] Other Mahāyāna sutras also mention a similar idea of the Buddha teaching in different phases, some which are provisional and others which are considered final.
