Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Avadāna – 79
verse, again Pāḷi and so forth. (Speyer, pp. xciii-c.) All these books
are up to now only known in manuscript. But there are others which
are accessible to us though only in their Tibetan and Chinese
translations. [62]
Avadānas in Chinese and Tibetan
As regards avadāna collections in Chinese (see Feer xxx) the Contes
et Apologues Indiens of Stanislas Julien, Paris, 1860, translated into
German by Schnell, 1903, are of Chinese origin, ultimately going
back to Sanskrit prime texts. But in our collections of manuscripts
and in Chinese and Tibetan translations we have preserved to us not
only anthologies of avadānas, but also several individual avadānas
of extensive compass. For instance, the Sumāgadhāvadāna,
represents the legends of Sumāgadha, the daughter of the famous
merchant Anāthapiṇḍada, who creates an aversion for the Jains in
her husband and by a miracle converts the whole city to the religion
of the Buddha. In one of her former births she was the daughter of
dreams. These dreams have a wider significance than as affecting
Sanskrit or even Buddhist literature. They belong to the literature of
the world (See Jātaka No. 77 and S. d’Oldenburg in Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society p. 509 ff., and Tsuru-Matsu Tokiwai Studies in
Sumāgadhāvadāna, Dissertation for the University of Strassburg,
1889; Raj. Mitra, p. 237.) It is remarkable that the same avadāna is
quoted from a Vinaya text in the Abhidharmakośa Vyākhyā of
Yaśomitra. Finally, we have to make particular mention of the
ponderous corpus of avadānas by the great Kashmirian Buddhist
poet Kṣemendra, who flourished about 1040 A.D. His work the
Avadāna-Kalpalatā enjoys high reputation in Tibet.