Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Sūtrālaṅkāra – 149
himself to consent to attend to the Buddhist text except on condition
of adding a refutation of it. Aśvaghoṣa might well be proud of it.
The point of the Diamond Needle which he flattered himself he had
prepared was by no means dulled by the attack of the offended
Brahman. Thus the violent Buddhist polemist who [179] had so
frequently and so cruelly humiliated the pride of the Brahman once
more enters the scene after centuries of silence in the shock of
religious controversy.
Buddhist and Brahmanic controversy
Burnouf, to whom Hodgson had generously handed over along with
other manuscripts the copy of Vajrasūcī and the Buddhacarita
indicated in his Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism the
interest of these two works. He proposed himself to revert to the
question of the identity of the author “later on.” The Chinese
Buddhistic documents analysed by Rémusat had meanwhile taught
that one of the patriarchs of the Buddhist Church, the twelfth since
the death of Śākyamuni, had borne the name of Aśvaghoṣa. With his
strong common sense Burnouf declined to see in one single
personage the patriarch and the author on the faith of a resemblance
of names. He was inclined rather to consider the two productions as
the work of an ascetic or religious writer of more modern times.
Next to Burnouf, the Vajrasūcī had the good fortune to interest
another Indianist of equal erudition, Albrecht Weber. In a memoir
submitted to the Berlin Academy in 1859, Weber pointed to a
Brahmanic recension of the Vajrasūcī. It was classed in the
respectable category of Upaniṣads and attributed to the most
fortunate and most fierce adversary of the moribund Buddhism of
those days, the great Śaṅkara Ācārya. Weber believed himself