ASVAGHOSA. - Indian poet, lyricist, epic writer, dramatist, philosopher, and, according to his Tibetan biographer, musician, musical composer, and itinerant director of singing troupes, who lived in the 1st century AD, contemporary of the Buddhist king Kanishka. Born into a Brahmin family in Saketa (i.e., Ayodhya, today Oude), he converted to Buddhism, to the exaltation of which—particularly of *buddhabhaktī*, "the salvific grace of faith in the Buddha"—after having belonged to the Buddhist school of the Sarvāstivādins, the "assertors of all," i.e., realists, he dedicated all his remarkable activity. He is to be considered one of the greatest 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 its 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 Amrtāṇanda, who composed them in the 19th century, since no complete manuscript existed in his time. The authentic text extends only 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 highest honor. The *Buddhacarita*, for its merits of language and style and for the richness of its content (many ancient legends are in it faithfully and at the same time most artistically reproduced), is in fact to be considered among the most admirable manifestations of the Indian poetic genius.
Another poem of notable importance that also treats particular episodes in the life of the Buddha, with a thoroughly Mahāyāna tendency, is the *Saundarāṇanda-kāya*, by some considered anterior to the *Buddhacarita*, in which the life of Nanda, the Buddha’s half-brother, who, madly in love with his wife Sundarī, was induced by the Buddha, against his will and through the hardest trials, to abandon her and become a monk, is narrated in particular.