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A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.s3: 3. The Avadānas

A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.s3

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English

3. The Avadānas

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Connected with Açvaghoṣa, sometimes identified with him by tradition, is a mysterious Mātṛceṭa,² of whose numerous works fragments alone, from his *Çatapañcāçatika-stotra*,³ exist in Sanskrit. These show a fairly elegant style of religious lyric devotion. The taste of the time, however, seems to have preferred the telling of tales dealing with the endless theme of the fruits of man’s deeds. Moreover the view of the Buddhists who loved these Avadānas⁴—tales of great acts or perhaps of the causes of man’s future⁵—was not a narrowly moral one. They were not content to exemplify the somewhat cold doctrine of the due reward of a man’s actions regarded merely from the moral point of view. They were frankly Buddha worshippers and believed wholeheartedly in the efficacy of any act of devotion to the Buddha or his followers as having the power to influence indefinitely for good the life of man; equally they held that an insult to the Buddha was certain to bear appalling fruit. Of the Avadāna texts preserved the oldest may be the *Avadānaçataka*,¹ which is stated to have been rendered into Chinese in the first half of the third century A.D., and which, as containing the term *dīnāra*, can hardly belong to any period earlier than A.D. 100. Artistically the work has scanty merit; its arrangement in ten decades each according to subject-matter is schematic; the tales open with set formulae, contain set formulae of description, as of the laughter of the Buddha, and of moral exhortation; exaggeration and long-windedness mark the whole, and beauty of form is sacrificed to the desire to be edifying. From this point of view, indeed, the tales often reveal thoughts of some beauty; Maitrakanyaka, condemned for wrongs done to his mother to endure in hell the punishment of bearing on his head a wheel of red-hot iron for 66,000 years until another who has committed a like sin comes to relieve him of his burden, resolves that rather will he for ever and ever endure the pain, and is rewarded forthwith by the disappearance of the instrument of torment. Çrīmatī, wife of Bimbisāra, pays homage to the relics of the Buddha which the king had enclosed in a Stūpa for worship by the ladies of his harem; the parricide Ajātaçatru forbids such homage on pain of death, but Çrīmatī disobeys, and, slain by the king's order, is born again in the world of the gods.

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² Cf. Thomas, ERE. viii. 495.

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³ Lévi, JA. 1910, ii. 433–56; Poussin, JRAS. 1911, pp. 759–77. For his *Varṇanārhavarṇana* see Thomas, IA. xxxiv. 145 ff.

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⁴ Przyluski (*La légende de l’empereur Açoka* (1923), pp. viii f., 214) holds that there were two Vinayas of the Sarvāstivādins, one of Mathurā with Avadānas or Jātakas, one of Kashmir without them; the *Divyāvadāna* may all be derived from the first of these Vinayas; Lévi, *T'oung Pao*, viii. 105–22; JA. 1914, ii. 494.

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⁵ Zimmer, ZII. iii. 203 ff.

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¹ Ed. J. S. Speyer, BB. 3, 1902–9; trans. L. Feer, AMG. 18, 1891.

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Far more interesting as literature is the *Divyāvadāna*,² a collection of legends which draws, like the *Avadānaçataka*, largely on the *Vinayapiṭaka* of the Sarvāstivādin school of Buddhism. Its date is uncertain; its origin is complex; one section is definitely described as a Mahāyāna Sūtra, while the body of the work is still of the Hīnayāna school. The term *dīnāra* occurs, and one famous tale, the Çārdūlakarṇāvadāna, was rendered into Chinese in A.D. 265. It tells how the Buddha by his skill in persuasion converted to the faith the maiden Prakṛti, who had conceived a deep love for the beloved disciple Ānanda and would have won him from his vows, had he not at the moment of his greatest danger sought refuge in his master’s strength. The gem of the collection is doubtless the pathetic legend of Kunāla, son of Açoka,¹ whose false stepmother succeeds in poisoning his father’s mind against him and in having him blinded without his permitting himself either hate or reproach. We find, however, also a still more gruesome and to us repellent theme in the tale of Rūpavatī, who severs her own breasts in order to feed a hungry mother when on the point of eating her own child; Rūpavatī is extolled as a pattern of the Bodhisattva who seeks to save the whole world, and is accorded the somewhat quaint honour of being reborn as a prince, Rūpavata.

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² Ed. E. B. Cowell and R. A. Neil, Cambridge, 1886.

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¹ The original *Açokāvadāna*, according to Przyluski, *La légende de l’empereur Açoka* (1923), was composed by a monk of Mathurā about two centuries before Kaniṣka (between 150–100 B. C.).

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The style of the book is very uneven, as a result of the diversity of its sources. Besides ordinary simple Sanskrit prose, intermingled here and there with Gāthās, we find here and there passages in elaborate metres and prose with the long compounds approved by writers on poetics. Thus Avadāna xxxviii is a version in elaborate style of the story of Maitrakanyaka in the form found in the *Avadānaçataka*. More interesting to us is the preservation, as part of the cycle of legends of Açoka (xxvi–xxix), of the dramatic episode of the conversion of the demon Māra by the virtuous Upagupta. The idea, ingenious in itself, is carried out with spirit and imagination; Māra is converted and Upagupta, who desires to see with his eyes the Buddha long since dead, asks him to appear before him in the Buddha’s form. Māra obeys, and the devotee falls down in worship before the wondrous apparition of the master he loved. We can recognize here, without question, borrowing from Açvaghoṣa in manner, as in substance from the *Sūtrālaṁkāra*; style and metre are of the classical type which his poems display. Moreover, we can trace² in this section of the work clear instances of knowledge of the *Buddhacarita* and even of the less popular *Saundarananda*; thus Gupta’s son is described as beautiful beyond men but yet inferior to the gods (*atikrānto mānuṣavarṇam asamprāptaç ca divyavarṇam*), and this somewhat clumsy expression can hardly be derived from any source other than Açvaghoṣa’s elegant *atītya martyān anupetya devān*.

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² Gawroński, *Studies about the Sansk. Buddh. Lit.*, pp. 49 ff.

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Similarly, both xxii and xxxviii contain reminiscences of the *Buddhacarita* both in the polish of their style and in actual verbal similarities; in the latter we have:

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*tṛṣṇānilaiḥ çokaçikhāpracaṇḍaiḥ: cittāni dagdhāni bahuprakāram*
*āçāvatāṁ sapraṇayābhirāmair: dānāmbuṣekaiḥ çamayāmbabhūva.*

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‘The flames of desire, kindled by sorrow, in the minds of those full of longing were extinguished by the torrents of his generosity, made beautiful by his courtesy.’

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In the less polished parts of the collection we find many curious specimens of the influence of Pāli or Prākrit on the writers. Thus we have forms like *sarpi* for *sarpis*, *parvaḥ* for *parva*, *yam* for *yat*, *tāvanta* for *tāvant*, *pīthi* for *vīthi*. The use of particles often deviates from Sanskrit practice: thus *api* ... *api* serves as equivalent to *et* ... *et*; *apy eva* means perhaps, *prāg eva* often, *yāvat quippe*; the favourite Buddhist form of denoting place, *yena* ... *tena*, is common; and *yataḥ*, *yadbhūyasā*, *tatprathamataḥ*, and *yat khalu* are common as conjunctions. As prepositions we find *sarvānte*, after, *sakāmam*, to please, *sthāpayitvā*, except. Rare words and meanings abound, as *āpatti*, sin, *kola*, raft, *gulma*, custom-house, *uddhava*, cheerfulness, *paribhāṣ*, abuse, *niçritya*, going to, *pragharati*, ooze forth (*prakṣar-*),¹ *vyatisārayati kathām*, converse, *anyatara*, *anyatama*, any one, *bhūyasyā mātrayā*, still more.

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¹ The Vedic *ghṛ* may be the origin of this formation, if it is not itself a Prākritism; cf. Geiger, *Pāli*, p. 67.

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