Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Lalitavistara – 35
an anonymous compilation in which very old and very young
fragments stand in juxtaposition. The book moreover consists,
according to its form, of unequal sections, a continuous narrative in
Sanskrit prose and numerous, often extensive, metrical pieces in
“Mixed Sanskrit.” Only rarely these verses constitute a portion of the
narrative. As a rule they are recapitulations of prose narration in an
abbreviated and simpler and sometimes also more or less divergent
form. Many of these metrical pieces are beautiful old ballads which
go back to the same ancient sources as the poems of the Pāḷi
Suttanipāta mentioned above. The examples are the birth legend and
the Asita episode in chapter VII, the Bimbisāra history in chapter
XVI and the dialogue with Māra in chapter XVIII. They belong to
the ancient religious ballad poesy of the first centuries after the
Buddha. But several prose passages also, like the sermon at Benares
in the XXVIth chapter, are assignable to the most ancient stratum of
Buddhistic tradition. On the other hand the younger components are
to be found not only in the prose but also in the Gāthās, many of
which are composed in highly artistic metres. Such are the
Vasantatilaka and Śārdūlavikrīḍita which are tolerably frequent (see
the index to metres in Lefmann’s edition VII, p. 227 f, and
Introduction, p. 19 ff).
Translation into Chinese and Tibetan
We do not know when the final redaction of the Lalitavistara took
place. It was formerly erroneously asserted that the work had
already been translated into Chinese in the first Christian century.
As a matter of fact we do not at all know whether the Chinese
biography of the Buddha called the Phuyau-king which was
published in about 300 A.D., the alleged “second translation of the