གསར་མདག་ག་སྔན་གྱ་སྦྱར་བ་ཞས་བྱ་བ notes.1

notes.1

1. The title of the extant Sanskrit text in the Divyāvadāna is Kanaka­varṇāvadāna, which places it in the avadāna category. However, this designation is likely to have happened when the Divyāvadāna, the collection of texts in which it has been preserved, was compiled. At this time, the different individual texts, whether strictly belonging to the jātaka, avadāna, or pūrvayoga genres or not, were all given the avadāna designation. Historically, the avadāna and pūrvayoga genres, which involve the past lives of other figures apart from the Buddha, appear to be posterior to the jātakas, which exclusively narrate the Buddha Śākyamuni’s past lives. This development might be suggested by the fact that the avadāna genre is among the three added categories in the Sanskrit list of twelve types of teaching (dvādaśāṅga) that are not found in the Pali list of nine types of teachings (navaṅga), which, however, does include jātaka as a category. Both the avadāna and the pūrvayoga genres seem to have been especially popular in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, as can be inferred from the relatively large number of texts of this type among the recently discovered Kharoṣṭhī manuscripts in the Gāndhārī language (see Lenz 2003; 2010). In fact, the term pūrvayoga might have its provenance there, as has been suggested by von Hinüber (2001, p. 520) on the basis of the occurrence of the term in the Milindapañha, a Pali text that has its origin in Gandhāra. At the beginning of the Milindapañha, before the narration of the past lives of its two protagonists, Nāgasena and King Milinda, we also find a short definition of the term: “pubbayoga means their past actions” (pubbayogo ti tesāṃ pubbakammaṃ; Mil 2.23). Interestingly, within the surviving Gāndhārī corpus of avadānas and pūrvayogas, which has been dated to approximately the first half of the first century ce, a strict distinction is maintained in designating the two kinds of texts: while the pūrvayoga is an account of someone’s actions in a previous lifetime, the avadāna is always an account of actions performed in the present lifetime (Lenz 2003, p. 92). From this it would appear that the avadāna form that includes past-life stories, as found in such collections as the Avadānaśataka and the Divyāvadāna, arose only in later centuries, during which the avadāna genre came to encompass both jātaka and pūrvayoga stories.