Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Mahāyānasūtras – 93
world fashioning from his eyes the moon and the sun, Maheśvara
from his forehead, Brahman from his shoulders, Narāyana from his
heart, and from his teeth the goddess of speech Sarasvatī. Precisely
as this introduction is of the [75] Purāṇic kind, so also are the
language and style of the metrical Kāraṇḍavyūha totally of the
younger Purāṇas. We have no evidence that the theistic Buddhism
with its Ādibuddha as a creator existed in India, prior to the tenth
century. Even La Vallée-Poussin only demonstrates that the creed of
Ādibuddha was spread over India but not that it can be proved to
have existed in ancient times. (Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
I. p. 95). Further, the fact that the Tibetan translation which was
made probably in 1616 A.D. and which is found in the Kanjur and is
based on the prose version, which does not contain the Ādibuddha
section, shows that the poetic version was then unknown. (La Vallée-
Poussin, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, p. 259). On the
other hand, the cult of Avalokiteśvara is already familiar to the
Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien, about 400 A.D. He himself implores this
Bodhisattva for rescue when he is overtaken by a storm on his
voyage from Ceylon to China. The oldest images of Avalokiteśvara
date from the fifth century. A Chinese translation of a
Kāraṇḍavyūha was made as early as 270 A.D.
L. A. Waddell, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1894, p. 57; A.
Foucher, Etude sur l’iconographic Boudhique de l’Inde, Paris 1900 p.
97 ff., and La Vallée-Poussin, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
II, p. 250 ff; Buniyo Nanjio, Catalogue No. 168 where the title is
given a Ratnakāraṇḍaka-vyūhasūtra. A second translation was made
between 420 and 479.