Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Aśvaghoṣa and his School – 42
parts of India and in the countries of the South Sea (Sumātra, Jāva
and the neighbouring islands). He clothed manifold notions and
ideas in a few words which so delighted the heart of his reader that
he never wearied of perusing the poem. Moreover it was regarded as
a virtue to read it in as much as it contained the noble doctrine in a
neat compact form” (I-tsing p. 165 f.). From what I-tsing says it
follows that he knew the Buddhacarita in the form of its Chinese
translation in which the epic consists of 28 cantos and the narrative
is brought down to the Nirvāṇa of the Buddha.
It is the Fo-sho-hing-t-tsan translated from Sanskrit into Chinese
between 414 and 421 by Dharmarakṣa and by Beal from Chinese into
English in Sacred Books of the East XIX, Rhys Davids (Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society 1901, p.405 f.) has rightly emphasized that
this Chinese work is no translation in our sense. Much more accurate
is the rendering of the 7th or 8th century into Tibetan (Leumann,
Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes 7,1893, p, 193
ff.).
Now since the Tibetan translation also contains 28 cantos we must
indeed suppose that in the Sanskrit text which comprises only 17
cantos and terminates with the [31] conversions in Benares we have
only a torso; and in fact it is but a torso. For out of these 17 cantos
only the first 13 are old and genuine. The concluding portion was
of the 19th century, because he himself admits he could find no
complete manuscript. Even the manuscript of the Buddhacarita
discovered by Haraprasada Shastri reaches down only to the middle
of the 14th canto (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal Vol. 5 p.
47 ff.).