AŠVAGHOŠA. — Indian poet—lyric, epic, and dramatic—as well as philosopher and, according to his Tibetan biographer, musician, composer, and itinerant director of companies of singers, who lived in the first century A.D. and was a contemporary of the Buddhist king Caniska. Born into a Brahmanical family at Sāketa (that is, Ayodhya, today Oude), he turned to Buddhism, to the glorification of which—particularly of buddhabhakti, “the saving grace of faith in the Buddha”—after having belonged to the Buddhist school of the Sarvāstivādin, the “assertors of everything,” that is, realists, he devoted all his remarkable energy. He is to be regarded as 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 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 copyist, one Amṛtānanda, who composed them in the nineteenth century, since no complete manuscript existed in his time. The authentic text extends as far as the Enlightened One’s victory over Māra (v.).
Already at the time of the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing, who travelled through India between 671 and 695, A.’s works were widely circulated and held in the highest esteem. The Buddhacarita, in fact, on account of its linguistic and stylistic merits and its richness of content (many ancient legends are reproduced in it both faithfully and with considerable artistry), must be regarded as one of the most remarkable manifestations of Indian poetic genius.
Another poem of considerable importance, which likewise treats particular episodes in the life of the Buddha and is wholly mahāyānic in tendency, is the Saundarānandahāvya, considered by some to be earlier than the Buddhacarita. It chiefly recounts 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.