Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Sūtrālaṅkāra – 153
The National Library of Paris possesses a manuscript of the
Buddhacarita. Sylvain Lévi copied it and prepared an able edition
and translation of it, publishing as a specimen the first canto in the
Journal Asiatique. Subsequently he learned that an English scholar
of repute, Cowell, professor at the University of Cambridge, had
recommended to print in the Anecdota Oxoniensia a complete
edition of the same text. With rare chivalry Sylvain Lévi effaced
himself before the English scholar. The entire text appeared in
England in 1893, soon followed by an English translation. Cowell
familiar alike with the classics of India had no hesitation in
recognising in Aśvaghoṣa a precursor and even a model of Kālidāsa.
He suggested striking similarities to prove that the Ennius of India as
he called him had more than [183] once lent his treasures to Virgil.
He further established that the authentic work of Aśvaghoṣa stopped
with the fourteenth canto and that a later compilator has clumsily
fabricated the last three songs with a view to giving a kind of
integrity to the mutilated poem. Like the Vajrasūcī, the
Buddhacarita became soon the object of close study on the part of
the most eminent Indianists, Bühler, Kielhorn, Böhtlingk, Leumann,
Lüders, who exercised their ingenuity on the restoration of the
corrupted text.
In search of the treasure
The fundamental problem of Hindu chronology led the great French
scholar, Sylvain Lévi, a little later, to the Sūtralaṅkāra. In his quest
of documents on the Indo-Scythian king Kaniṣka he came upon in
the Chinese version two stories which extolled the orthodoxy and the
piety of this great king. (Journal Asiatique, 1896-97.) Mastered by
the beauty of the work in the Chinese rendering, Lévi did not despair