A History of Sanskrit Literature c33.s7.5

c33.s7.5

The *Lalitavistara*,¹ which also was originally of the Sarvāstivāda school, gives a biography of the Buddha which has been altered in the sense of the Mahāyāna development of Buddhism. The book is full of miracles, including the tales which have been asserted to have spread to the west of the falling down of the statues before the young child when he visited the temple, and of his explaining to the teacher the sixty-four kinds of writing, including those of the Chinese and the Huns. In style the work is as much of a patchwork as in substance. It is written in prose in Sanskrit with verse portions in mixed Sanskrit; these normally do not carry on the prose account, but run parallel with it, giving it in brief form. The ballads of this sort are often clearly old, as shown by comparison with the Pāli tradition as in the case of the Asita legend (vii), the Bimbisāra story (xvi), the dialogue between the Buddha and Māra (xviii), but the prose also is sometimes used in old matter, as in the version of the sermon at Benares (xxvi), while among the verse portions occur later work, where such elaborate metres as Çārdūlavikrīḍita and Vasantatilaka are used. The date of the text is quite uncertain; it was rendered into Tibetan in the ninth century and was well known to the artists of Boro Bodur in Java (850–900). Its spirit of reverence of the Buddha corresponds to the artistic revolution of the Gandhāran art which reveals the portrait of the Buddha, whereas the older tradition of Sānchi and Bharhut showed symbols only of the blessed one, and the work may in the main belong to the period from the second century A. D.