The History of Buddhist Thought c28.s4.8

c28.s4.8

Another title of one of these lives, given by Beal as that of the book of the Sarvāstivādins, is *Ta-chong-yen*, “Great magnificence,” which Vasiliev identified with the *Lalita-vistara*. But the latter title means “extended account of the sports (of the Bodhisattva)”, and it is a Mahāyāna work. It is, however, easy to see that the *Lalita-vistara* is based largely on Sarvāstivāda material, and this material may even have been the work called “Great Magnificence”. The *Lalita-vistara*, besides containing much avadāna matter, still retains direct evidence of having once been a Sarvāstivāda avadāna, for it has two beginnings. After the usual introduction of a Mahāyāna sūtra, saying that the Lord once dwelt at Śrāvastī, it begins over again: “At that time the Lord was dwelling near the great city of Śrāvastī, honoured, reverenced, respected, worshipped.” If the words “at that time” were omitted, we should have the same abrupt beginning as we find in the avadānas, followed by the same stereotyped list of epithets, *satkṛto, gurukṛto*, etc. This looks like a survival of the original beginning of an avadāna. The work is of much greater literary ability than the *Mahāvastu*. The narrative is well ordered, and much of it, both in prose and verse, corresponds closely to the Pāli, but is most probably from the Sarvāstivāda Canon. Besides this there are long verbose passages of purely Mahāyāna origin, as well as poems very different from the canonical verses which it quotes. They are often in elaborate metres and in very corrupt Sanskrit due to their having been adapted and Sanskritized as far as possible from a Prakrit dialect.