Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Avadāna – 61
these species of avadānas occur sporadically also in the Vinaya and
the Sūtra piṭakas. They however, are grouped in large collections
with the object of edification or for more ambitious literary motives.
A work of the first variety is the Avadānaśataka which is most
probably the most ancient of its kind. It is a collection of a hundred
avadāna legends. Since it was already rendered into Chinese in the
first half of the 3rd century and since it makes mention of the dinara
we may with tolerable certainty assign it to the second Christian
century. That it belongs to the Hīnayāna is indicated already by the
character [47] of the anecdotes; but this is likewise corroborated by
the circumstances that in the stories relating to the present there are
fragments embodied from the Sanskrit canon of the Sarvāstivādis
relating to the Parinirvāṇa and other sūtras. In these legends the
worship of the Buddha plays a great part. There is no trace in them,
however, of the Bodhisattva cult or of any Mahāyānistic mythology.
Avadānaśātaka
The Avadānaśataka consists of ten decades, each treating of a
different theme. The first four contain stories designed to show the
nature of acts, the performance of which enables a man to become a
Buddha or a Pratyeka Buddha. The division into vargas (Pāḷi: vagga)
of ten components each is a favourite with Pāḷi texts and accordingly
would appear to date from the older Buddhist period. All the tales of
the first and nearly all of the third decade are of a prophetic nature.
Here an act of piety is related by which a person – a Brahman, a
princess, the son of an usurer, a wealthy merchant, a gardener, a
king, a ferry man, a young maiden and so forth – makes adoration to
the Buddha which usually leads to the occurrence of some kind of