A History of Sanskrit Literature c10.s3.1

c10.s3.1

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.