Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Avadāna – 80
The text with the Tibetan translation is edited in the Bibliotheca
Indica series by Sarat Chandra Das and Hari Mohan Vidyabhushana.
Kṣemendra is a prolific writer and versifier of almost astounding
fertility. We shall come across him more than once later on because
he has occupied himself with various provinces of literature.
However, he [63] distinguished himself less by his genius and taste
than by his iron assiduity. The great mass of legends into which
Kṣemendra works the Buddhist Avadānas in the style of the elegant
poetry is more didactic than spiritual as regards the tales which he
selects. The Buddhist propensity to self-sacrifice has been carried
here to such refinement and to such a pitch and the doctrine of
karma has been inculcated with such extravagance and above all the
moral is so thickly strewn over that it often overshoots the mark.
The collection consists of 107 legends to which Somendra, the son of
Kṣemendra, added, besides an introduction, the one hundred and
eighth tale of Jīmūtavahāna. All these legends are mostly known to
us either from other Avadāna anthologies or otherwise. The
Padmavatī Avadāna, for instance, is the story of Padmavatī familiar
Mahāvastu (Nachrichten von der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften
zu Gottingen, 1901 p. 26) and Luders has shown that Kṣemendra has
worked up this legend after the Mahāvastu. The version by
Kṣemendra of this story has been reproduced in German verse by H.
Francke.