Book Title: Text of Confucianism Part 02
Author(s): James Legge
Publisher: Oxford


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Page 1548
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INTRODUCTION.
xxxi
literature (he became a disciple at six years of age). Both these translators lived about A. D. 400.
I am told, however, by Mr. Rockhill, that Taranatha, the Tibetan author, mentions three writers of the name of Asvaghosha, the 'great one,' the younger, and one who lived in the eighth century A. D. This latter, who was also called Çura, could not be the Asvaghosha of our text, as the translation of the work dates from the fifth century. And as of the other two, one was called 'the great' and the other the younger, it admits of little question that the Bodhisattva would be the former. But in the Chinese Catalogues, so far as I have searched, there is no mention made of more than one writer called by this name, and he is ever affirmed to have been a contemporary of Kanishka. In the book Tsah-pao-tsang-king, for instance (kiouen vi), there are several tales told of the Kandan
Kanika' or 'Kanishka,' in one of which (fol. 13) Asvaghosha is distinctly named as his religious adviser, and he is there called 'the Bodhisattva;' so that, according to evidence derived from Chinese sources, there seems no reason to doubt that the author of the book I have here translated was living at and before the time of the Scythian invasion of Magadha under the Kandan king Kanishka. With respect to the date of this monarch we have no positive evidence; the weight of authority sides with those who place him at the beginning of the Saka period, i.e. A.D. 78. It is therefore possible that the emissaries who left China A. D. 64 and returned A. D. 67 may have brought back with them some knowledge of the work of Asvaghosha called Fo-pen-hing, or of the original then circulating in India, on which Asvaghosha founded his poem. It is singular at least that the work of Asvaghosha is in five chapters as well as that translated by Ku-fa-lan. In any case we may conclude that as early as about A. D. 70, if not before, there was in India a work known as Buddhakarita (Fo-pen-hing).
As to the origin of such a work, it seems likely to have sprung from an enlargement of the Mahaparinirvana Satra. We know that the record of the history of Buddha's last
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