Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Avadāna – 64
Culture Evidences
A pious man, an opulent personage, a mighty sovereign, a happy
wedding, the up-bringing of a young man, the appearance of an
earlier Buddha and similar recurring phenomena are ever described
in stereotyped terms. Nor is this applicable only to a few brief
sentences. It holds good for extensive pieces covering several pages
of print. One of the longest of these fixture pieces describes the smile
of the Buddha with which the latter lays down that every one can
attain to the state of a Buddha. The Buddha always is moved to a
smile before he prophesies the future. When he smiles from his
mouth issue rays of blue, yellow, red and white. One of these beams
of light go down to the depths of inferno the others are darted
heavenwards. After encircling thousands and thousands of worlds
they return back to the Buddha and disappear into some one or the
other of the parts of the Buddha’s body according to the nature of
the vaticination; and all this is delineated to the minutest particular.
This circumstantiality and the minutiae are characteristic of the
narrative mode of the Avadānaśataka. However together with much
that is banal and wearisome we always get edifying stories and many
valuable anecdotes and noteworthy variants to other stories
accessible to us from other portions of Buddhist narrative literature.
[50] We can cite only a few examples in order to give an idea of the
character of this remarkable collection of Buddhist folklore. Here
are some characteristic stories in which the true social life of India is
mirrored.