Aśvaghoṣa follows his scriptural sources closely in his narration of the story of the Buddha’s last journey leading to his nirvāṇa. The Buddhacarita and the Pāli Mahāparinibbānasutta mirror each other in their accounts of most of the places that the Buddha visited and the many events that took place during that journey. What the Buddhacarita and the Pāli sutta have in common also suggests that Aśvaghoṣa’s sources are already highly literary, even though the Buddhist poet transforms the traditional materials through (...) versification and literary embellishment. He also freshly designs occasional religious dialogs and philosophical meditation. Aśvaghoṣa’s literary accomplishments met with different responses outside South Asia. In China, the translation of the Buddhacarita was used as an authority and a source of information in erudite biographies of the Buddha, a Buddhist history, a Buddhist encyclopedia, and lexicographical works. In Tibet, where Indian literary classics were actively studied, interpreted, and used as literary models, the Buddhacarita has been surprisingly ignored after it was rendered by a lesser known Tibetan translator between 1260 and 1280. (shrink)

The present paper is the third in a series dedicated to uncovering the canonical sources of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita and, to the extent possible, the monk-poet’s sectarian affiliation. Whereas parts I and II focused on Chapter 16’s indebtedness to (Mūla)sarvāstivāda Vinaya and/or Sūtra literature, this third part inquires into the sources of Aśvaghoṣa’s account of the Buddha’s enlightenment in Chapter 14 (whose first 31 verses have been preserved in their Sanskrit original). Detailed analysis reveals this chapter’s intimate relationship with T. 189, (...) a (Mūla)sarvāstivāda (?) biographical sūtra extant in Chinese translation only, but also with textual materials that have come to belong to Mūlasarvāstivāda literature and, as already demonstrated by Kajiyama Yūichi, with the Nagar(opam)asūtra of the Saṃyuktāgama. Among these likely sources, some provide a lively description of the five destinies, others relate to the iconographic prescriptions laid down for drawing the so-called Wheel of saṃsāra/existence, while yet others spell out the doctrine of dependent origination. The detailed comparison of these materials is followed by an admittedly speculative attempt to assess the relationship between these sources. (shrink)