Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Mahāvastu
Summary
The Mahāvastu (Sanskrit for "Great Event" or "Great Story") is a canonical text of the Mahāsāṃghika Lokottaravāda school of Early Buddhism which was originally part of the school's Vinaya pitaka. The Mahāvastu is a composite multi-life hagiography of the Buddha Shakyamuni. It's numerous textual layers are held by scholars to have been compiled between the 2nd century BCE and 4th century CE.
The Mahāvastu was first published in the West in an editio princeps by Émile Senart between 1882 and 1897. This edition is in a language which has been termed buddhist-hybrid Sanskrit.
The text is a composite one which includes past life narratives, stories of previous Buddhas, stories of Gautama Buddha's final life, embedded early Buddhist sutras and two prologues (nidānas). Over half of the text is composed of Jātaka and Avadāna tales, accounts of the earlier lives of the Buddha and other bodhisattvas.
The Mahāvastu opens with two prologues (nidānas), the Nidānanamaskāras (dating to around the 3rd century CE) and the Nidānavastu (c. 1st century CE).
Four sections of the Mahāvastu contain texts of the Bahubuddhaka sūtra genre. This includes a bahubuddhasūtra in chapter XXI of Jones' translation, Volume III and Chapter V in Jones Volume I. The Bahubuddhakasūtras are sutras which contain narratives of past Buddhas and these narratives often served as sources for Buddhist doctrines relating to the bodhisattva path. Parallel examples of Bahubuddhakasūtras have been found in Gandharan Buddhist text collections. One of these manuscripts dates to the 1st century BCE. Another parallel Bahubuddhaka sūtra is the Chinese translation Fo benxing ji jing (Taisho 190).
The Mahāvastu's Jātaka tales are similar to those of the Pali Canon although significant differences exist in terms of the tales' details. Other parts of the Mahāvastu have more direct parallels in the Pali Canon including from the Digha Nikaya (DN 19, Mahāgovinda Sutta), the Majjhima Nikaya (MN 26, Ariyapariyesana Sutta; and, MN 36, Mahasaccaka Sutta), the Khuddakapātha, the Dhammapada (ch.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.