Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Sūtrālaṅkāra – 168
monk “a hundred years after the disappearance of the Buddha.”
Elsewhere we are told that a master of the Law, who had lived in the
time of Buddha Kāśyapa, reappeared “a hundred years after the
Parinirvāṇa of the Buddha Śākyamuni under the reign of King
Aśoka.” This interval of one century we find to be also fixed by a
prophecy occurring in the Vinaya or the disciplinary code of the
Mūla Sarvāstivāda in which we are told that Aśoka must take birth a
hundred years after the Parinirvāṇa. [197] Kaniṣka himself is the
hero of two of the stories (14 and 31). In these he plays an instructive
and honourable part. In the first he addresses a lofty lesson of
charity to his minister Devadharma. In the second, deceived by his
piety, he salutes what he considers to be a stūpa of the Buddha, but in
reality pays homage to a Jain one, which immediately breaks to
pieces “because it did not deserve the homage of a king.” The first
episode takes place when Kaniṣka proceeds to the city which bears
his name, the city of Kaniṣkapura founded by the Indo-Scythian king
in Kashmir. To this day it bears the name in a scarcely altered form
Kanispore. It is situated to the south-west of Lake Woollar in the
Baramula defile (Stein, Rāja-Taraṇginī, vol. II, p.22). The presence
of Kaniṣka in the Sūtralaṅkāra does not seem to contradict the
unanimous tradition which attaches Aśvaghoṣa to the court of
Kaniṣka. It is permissible to recognise in these two stories a delicate
homage, which is by no means flattery addressed by the Buddhist
doctor to the protector of his church. Story 15 is founded on the
traditional avarice of King Nanda, who ruled over Gangetic India at
the time of the invasion of Alexander and who preceded the Maurya
dynasty. He had for his minister Vararuci whom we find in the
history to see the tradition fixing the epoch of Aśvaghoṣa. Vararuci
is in fact one of the great names of the literary tradition of India. He