Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

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Appendix II. Sūtrālaṅkāra, A Romance of
Literature
Prefatory
Truth is often stranger than fiction. The following romantic story is
entirely based on facts. It is common knowledge that some time
about the fourth Christian century Buddhism was introduced from
India into China. A number of sacred Hindu books, mostly
Buddhistic but some of them containing most interesting fragments
of Brahmanic literature by way of refutation, were translated into
Chinese. One of these books is the Sūtralaṅkāra. It comprises a series
of Buddhistic sermons in the guise of anecdotes and stories
terminating with a moral inculcated by Buddhism. The original was
in Sanskrit. Along with a vast number of Sanskrit books that
perished in India this book also was considered lost. To the credit of
French philological science the Chinese translation of it, which is
extant, was identified by the late lamented scholar, Édouard Huber,
who died a premature death in French Cochin China, about a couple
of years ago. The author of the Sanskrit book of sermons was
Aśvaghoṣa [Editor's note: it appears these days that the Sūtrālaṅkāra
is normally attributed to Asaṅga, not Aśvaghoṣa]. Being a Buddhist
he was more or less completely ignored by Brahmanic writers,
except a few who mentioned him only to combat his compositions.
Thanks to the late professor Cowell of Cambridge, it is now
established that Aśvaghoṣa was not only a great poet and a master of
style, whose brilliant diction popularised Buddhism, but was also a