The Guoqu xianzai yinguo jing as an Adaptation of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhacarita

Introduction

The Buddhacarita is a poetic account of the life of the Buddha that is unique in its genre and generally considered a masterpiece of classical literature;³ fourteen chapters of the Sanskrit poem have survived to our days in a Nepali manuscript dated to the second half of the thirteenth century or to the first half of the fourteenth.⁴

We should point out that, although different accounts of the life of the Buddha were circulating in India and Central Asia, we have evidence of only one poem titled Buddhacarita—a work of ornate literature (kāvya) in Sanskrit composed by the poet Aśvaghoṣa.⁵ Since we only have one version of this specific Sanskrit poem, we are not in a position to assert that different versions of the same poem ever existed.⁶ Two aspects make the Buddhacarita special in the landscape of Buddhist tradition: The author himself ascribed his poem to the range of belles-lettres,⁷ and he wrote it with a specific ideological agenda.⁸

The name Buddhacarita should not be taken as a generic term to define an account of the life of the Buddha produced in India or in an Indic language; although in the Chinese Buddhist Canon there are several accounts of the life of Śākyamūni Buddha, defining any Chinese translation/compilation on the life of the Buddha with the title of Buddhacarita would be misleading.

There is, in fact, another text frequently mentioned as a Chinese "version" of the Buddhacarita, the Fo benxing jing (T193);⁹ this account, however, cannot be compared to the Buddhacarita—its sections are different in titles, content, order, and structure.¹⁰

As for the Chinese translation of Aśvaghoṣa's poem, the Fo suoxing zan (T192)¹¹ is the only recognizable translation of the Buddhacarita, showing a consistent adherence to the Sanskrit poem that we find in Johnston's critical edition.¹² This has been thoroughly proven by the comparative reading proposed by Huang Baosheng, which shows how the two texts (Buddhacarita/Fo suoxing zan) have the same structure, sequences, and content, and can be read in parallel, each Sanskrit stanza of the Johnston edition corresponding to a precise section of Chinese text.¹³

Baoyun's 寶雲 (376?–449) authorship of...