Acvaghosha's Discourse on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana: Da Sheng QI Xin Lun Book

It's a classical Sanskrit poem. As Eliot Weinberger observes in his most recent book, for whatever reason, Sanskrit poetry has never really found it's style in English translation, the way that other Asian languages have---Japanese and Chinese for sure, but also Tamil, etc. So I was under no illusion that I was going to be reading a masterwork of poetry here. Olivelle's translation is pleasant, clear in it's imagery and easy to read. That's basically everything you want out of famously interminable Sanskrit poetry.

My interest in Asvaghosa was threefold: 1) as someone who was raised a Hindu, Sanskrit is for me (as it is for most people) absolutely tied up with the philosophy and culture of that faith. The sheer novelty of reading a Buddhist text in Sanskrit---and knowing that Asvaghosa is typically considered the *first* great Sanskrit poet, preceding the far more reknowned Kalidasa---was intriguing, something like what reading an ancient gospel of Christ written in Hebrew might be. There's something eerie about reading older Indian Buddhist texts in general, but particularly those in Sanskrit---something like feeling the aftermath of war when standing in a cleared field where a city stood. Buddhism is, even now, largely gone from India; but by the end of this text the Emperor Ashoka has declared it the new state faith. The gap terrifies.

2) B.R. Ambedkar, the drafter of India's constitution and the leading light of the Dalit movement, based his own telling of the Life of Buddha squarely on this text. This is intriguing. As Olivelle states in his introduction, Asvaghosa himself is most definitely a Brahmin, and is interested largely in reclaiming the Brahminical tradition in light of Buddhism (as a result, the Buddha actually does begin to bear a resemblance to Christ here in a significant way: he appears as the fulfillment *and* repudiation of the Brahminical faith). A text attempting to preserve in some way the Brahminical tradition becoming a source text for the most radical interpretation of The Dhamma to be crafted, one distinctly anti-Brahminical in aim, method, and goal; wild.

3) I just really love the story of the Buddha, and I will read it in any way it comes to me.

So, keeping in mind my interests, this is what I got from this.

1) It's Sanskrit poetry. I was surprised at how obviously this language, a largely *created* language for a hierarchical elite (a kind of country club Esperanto), maintained a literary tradition even when it expressed ideology not sanctified by that elite. Kalidasa has read his Asvaghosa. I think A.K. Ramanujan has observed that the typical Indian method of arguing against a position is not to mention the opponent's view at all, but to raise your argument and only subtly allude to the one you're attempting to dismantle. From that, I'm not sure I can read the later Sanskrit (Hindu) poets the same way, knowing the degree to which they must have been familiar with Buddhist arguments from this text. The other strange thing is, of course, how largely the early world of Buddhism is shared with what he now call Hinduism; not just the Brahminical references that Asvaghosa includes, but the general themes, settings, and mythology.

2) The source for the radical anticaste Buddha that Ambedkar has is largely not here. The Buddha is, of course, *always* nominally against status by birth, etc, and that's no different here. But in his desire to demonstrate that the Buddha's philosophy is the "jewel" of the intellectual class---as Ambedkar says, "who are, unfortunately, the Brahmins"---the Buddha and his Dhamma comes off largely conciliatory towards *Brahmins themselves*, even as he abandons and dismantles their philosophy and arguments one by one. Coming in with the galactic reach, I'll say that in 2017 America this seems very familiar, where people espouse what might seem like "antiwhite" antiracist thought rather often largely because it's been made to be as accessible as possible to the vast majority of "white" people...the issue isn't neccessarily with the thought in both cases (the Buddha's Dharma and popular antiracism), but one can hardly call it radical when it desperately needs (and needed) to be. I'll admit I was disappointed by this aspect of the text, but on the other hand it's my own fault: my expectations were anachronistic and hopeful. Asvaghosa's concern is with theology and practice, not philosophy.

3) The Sanskrit text is actually missing the last 14 chapters. As a result we get pulled out of the narrative right as The Buddha is having his awakening, which is, you know, a massive historico-religio cockblock. Olivelle summarizes the last 14 chapters, so you can get a good sense of how the text was going to proceed---through the Buddha's establishing of the Sangha, to his death, to the Emperor Ashoka converting to Buddhism and establishing it as state religion. I have to find one of the Chinese or Tibetan recensions of this to actually read it, but there are some intriguing things I can glimpse about the story through that. For one, despite the Buddha actually going to heaven to convert his birth mother, the story apparently never comes back around to the Buddha reengaging with his abandoned wife and son: typically Indian, dude comes back, makes up with his dad, and shit's solid. This is mostly disappointing because his wife's monologue when the Buddha abandons her is one of the stunning pieces in this poem, thematically indispensable and powerfully done. The other strange thing is ending the text with Ashoka's conversion. In the entirety of the text we have, the Buddha is explaining to us why, in our practice, we need to cut *all* fetters of sense attachment, and why that can't be done when one has any attachment to "the world". The story opens with a prince arguing that one must be an ascetic to practice Dhamma, giving up the world because the royal life will by necessity ensnare him; it ends with a literal conqueror adapting the Dhamma in his royal life and succeeding. The gap between those two is not something that Olivelle really explains in any of his notes.