Lalitavistara Sūtra

Translations of
Lalitavistara Sūtra
English The Extensive Play
Sanskrit Lalitavistara Sūtra
Chinese 普曜經
(Pinyin: Pǔyào Jīng)
Tibetan རྒྱ་ཆེར་རོལ་པ་
(Wylie: rgya cher rol pa )
Glossary of Buddhism

The Lalitavistara Sūtra is a Mahayana Buddhist sutra that tells the story of Gautama Buddha from the time of his descent from Tushita until his first sermon in the Deer Park near Varanasi. The term Lalitavistara has been translated "The Play in Full" or "Extensive Play," referring to the Mahayana view that the Buddha’s last incarnation was a "display" or "performance" given for the benefit of the beings in this world.

Outline of the text

The sutra consists of twenty-seven chapters:[1]

The Offering of the Four Bowls to the Buddha, Borobudur, Indonesia.

The story ends at the very moment when the Buddha has finally manifested all the qualities of awakening and is fully equipped to influence the world, as he did over the next forty-five years by continuously teaching the Dharma and establishing his community of followers.

The Borobudur reliefs

The Bodhisattva in Tushita before his birth as Siddhartha Gautama. Borobudur

The Borobudur reliefs contain a series of panels depicting the life of the Buddha as described in the Lalitavistara Sutra.[3] In these reliefs, the story starts from the glorious descent of the Buddha from the Tushita heaven, and ends with his first sermon in the Deer Park.

As an example of how widely the sutra was disseminated, the Lalitavistara Sutra was known to the Mantranaya (Vajrayana) practitioners of Borobudur,[4] who had the text illustrated by stonemasons.[lower-alpha 1]

Historical context

In the early 20th century, P. L. Vaidya believed that the finished Sanskrit text dated to the 3rd century A.D.[6]

The text is also said to be a compilation of various works by no single author and includes materials from the Sarvastivada and the Mahayana traditions.

Concerning the origins of the text, the Dharmachakra Translation Committee states:[7]

This scripture is an obvious compilation of various early sources, which have been strung together and elaborated on according to the Mahāyāna worldview. As such this text is a fascinating example of the ways in which the Mahāyāna rests firmly on the earlier tradition, yet reinterprets the very foundations of Buddhism in a way that fit its own vast perspective. The fact that the text is a compilation is initially evident from the mixture of prose and verse that, in some cases, contains strata from the very earliest Buddhist teachings and, in other cases, presents later Buddhist themes that do not emerge until the first centuries of the common era. Previous scholarship on The Play in Full (mostly published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) devoted much time to determining the text’s potential sources and their respective time periods, although without much success. [...] Although this topic clearly deserves further study, it is interesting to note that hardly any new research on this sūtra has been published during the last sixty years. As such the only thing we can currently say concerning the sources and origin of The Play in Full is that it was based on several early and, for the most part, unidentified sources that belong to the very early days of the Buddhist tradition.

Translations into English

Numerals

In the Lalitavistara, the Buddha explains to a mathematician named Arjuna the system of numerals in multiples of 100, starting from a koti (in later literature 10^7 but this is uncertain) to a tallakshana (10^53 then).

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ The indigenous term Mantranaya is not a corruption or misspelling of mantrayana, although it is largely synonymous. Mantranaya is the earlier term for the esoteric Mahayana teachings emphasizing mantras. The clearly Sanskrit sounding Mantranaya is evident in Old Javanese tantric literature, particularly as documented in the oldest esoteric Buddhist tantric text in Old Javanese, the Sang Kyang Kamahayanan Mantranaya see Kazuko Ishii (1992).[5]

References

  1. ↑ Dharmachakra Translation Committee 2013, p. iii-x.
  2. ↑ Falk, Harry (1993). Schrift im alten Indien: ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen (in German). Gunter Narr Verlag. p. 84.
  3. ↑ Soekmono (1976), pp 21-22.
  4. ↑ Miksic, J. (1990). Borobudur: Golden Tales of the Buddhas. Singapore: Periplus Editions Ltd.
  5. ↑ Ishii Kazuko (1992). "The Correlation of Verses of the 'Sang Kyang Kamahayanan Mantranaya' with Vajrabodhi's 'Japa-sutra'" (PDF). Area and Culture Studies. 44. Retrieved 2010-12-13.
  6. ↑ L. A. Waddell (1914). "The So-Called "Mahapadana" Suttanta and the Date of the Pali Canon". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: 661–680. Retrieved 2011-06-29.
  7. ↑ Dharmachakra Translation Committee 2013, p. xii.

Web references

  1. ↑ A Play in Full: Lalitavistara (2013), translated by the Dharmachakra Translation Committee (complete translation from Tibetan into English)

Sources

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