AŚVAGHOṢA. - Indian poet — lyric, epic, dramatic — as well as philosopher and, according to his Tibetan biographer, musician, musical composer and itinerant director of troupes of singers, who lived in the 1st century A.D., a contemporary of the Buddhist king Kanishka. Born into a Brahmanic family at Sāketa (that is, Ayodhya, today Oude), he turned to Buddhism, and after having belonged to the Buddhist school of the Sarvāstivādin, the "assertors of the all," that is, realists, he devoted all his admirable activity to its exaltation — particularly to buddhabhakti, "the saving grace of faith in the Buddha." He must be considered one of the major precursors of the great Buddhist current Mahāyāna (v. BUDDHISMO). His principal work is the Buddhacarita, "the [legendary] life of the Buddha," a poem of great artistic merit which, in the Chinese (completed between 414 and 421) and Tibetan translations, consisted of 28 cantos and extended as far as the nirvāṇa of the Enlightened One. The Sanskrit text of it, in the form in which it has come down to us, consists of 17 cantos, of which only 13 are to be considered authentic, the others being the work of a scribe, one Amṛtānanda, who composed them in the 19th century, since no complete manuscript existed in his time. The authentic text extends as far as the victory of the Enlightened One over Māra (v.).
Already in the time of the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing, who traveled through India between 671 and 695, the works of A. were widely diffused and held in the greatest honor. The Buddhacarita, for its merits of language and style and for its richness of content (many ancient legends are faithfully and at the same time most artistically reproduced in it), must in fact be considered among the most admirable manifestations of Indian poetic genius.
A poem also of notable importance, which likewise treats the particular episodes of the Buddha's life, with an entirely Mahāyānic tendency, is the Saundarānandahāvya, held by some to be earlier than the Buddhacarita, in which is particularly narrated the life of Nanda, the Buddha's half-brother, who, deeply in love with his wife Sundari, was induced by the Buddha, against his will and through the harshest trials, to abandon her and become a monk.
Bibliography2 works
Ambrogio Balfini