The Buddhacarita

Overview

Author

Aśvaghoṣa, a Buddhist monk and poet from Sāketa (Ayodhyā) in northern India, by tradition a Brahmin by birth and a convert to Buddhism

Date

Probably 1st–2nd century CE; Chinese and Tibetan tradition makes him a contemporary and adviser of the Kushan emperor Kaniṣka

Language and genre

Sanskrit verse; a mahākāvya, or 'great poem', the courtly epic genre later perfected by Kālidāsa, of which the Buddhacarita and the Saundarananda are the earliest complete examples

Original extent

Twenty-eight cantos, from the Buddha's birth to the distribution of his relics after his death, preserved complete only in a Tibetan translation and a fifth-century Chinese version

Surviving Sanskrit

Cantos I–XIII and the first part of XIV (to about verse 31), ending with the enlightenment; the opening of canto I is also lost in the oldest manuscript

This edition

E. B. Cowell's prose translation in Sacred Books of the East 49 (1894), seventeen books from late Nepalese manuscripts; the end of Book XIV and Books XV–XVII are a supplement by the Nepalese pandit Amṛtānanda, written in the nineteenth century

Setting

Kapilavastu and the Lumbinī garden in the Śākya country; the hermitages of the Ganges plain; Rājagṛha in Magadha; the river Nairañjanā and the Bodhi tree at Gayā; in the supplement, the Deer Park at Vārāṇasī

Main figures

Siddhārtha the Bodhisattva; his father Śuddhodana; his wife Yaśodharā; the groom Chandaka and the horse Kanthaka; the sage Asita; King Bimbisāra; the teacher Arāḍa; Māra, god of desire and death

Other works

The Saundarananda (the conversion of the Buddha's half-brother Nanda), and fragments of a Buddhist drama, the Śāriputraprakaraṇa, found in Central Asia

Key translations

Cowell (1894); E. H. Johnston (cantos I–XIV, 1936; later cantos from the Tibetan, 1937); Patrick Olivelle, Clay Sanskrit Library (2008); Charles Willemen, from the Chinese (2009)

Context

Aśvaghoṣa is the first Sanskrit court poet whose works survive in substantial form. The colophons of his poems call him a monk, a teacher and a great poet from Sāketa, the city of Ayodhyā, son of a woman named Suvarṇākṣī. Later Buddhist tradition adds that he was a learned Brahmin who was defeated in debate by a Buddhist teacher and converted, and Chinese and Tibetan sources make him a counsellor at the court of Kaniṣka, the Kushan emperor of the late first or early second century CE. These stories cannot be confirmed, but his poems show exactly what they claim: a deep knowledge of Brahmanical learning, the epics and the law books, joined to a monk's command of Buddhist doctrine (Johnston 1984) (Olivelle 2008).

The Buddhacarita, the 'Acts' or 'Life' of the Buddha, is a mahākāvya, a long ornate poem in cantos, written in a range of classical metres and full of the figures of speech that Sanskrit critics called alaṃkāra, 'ornament': similes, puns, elaborate descriptions of cities, women, gardens and battles. With his other long poem, the Saundarananda, it is the oldest surviving example of the form. Kālidāsa, writing perhaps three centuries later, brought the court epic to its classical height, and several passages in his poems seem to echo Aśvaghoṣa's. Aśvaghoṣa therefore stands near the beginning of a literary tradition that he may well have inherited rather than invented (Warder 1974) (Lienhard 1984).

The poem originally had twenty-eight cantos. It began with the Buddha's birth and ended after his death, with the division of his relics and the first council of his followers. Only the first fourteen cantos survive in Sanskrit, and the fourteenth is broken off soon after the night of enlightenment. The whole poem is preserved in a Tibetan translation and in a Chinese version of the fifth century, and these allowed E. H. Johnston to translate the later cantos into English in 1937. The Chinese pilgrim Yijing, who travelled in India in the seventh century, reported that the poem was widely read and recited (Johnston 1984) (Willemen 2009) (Beal 1883).

E. B. Cowell, Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, edited the Sanskrit text in 1893 and translated it the next year for the series Sacred Books of the East. His manuscripts were recent Nepalese copies that ended with a supplement: a Nepalese scholar, Amṛtānanda, unable to find the rest of the poem, had completed Book XIV and added three books of his own, carrying the story to the first sermon and the Buddha's return to Kapilavastu. Cowell translated these with the rest and noted their origin. Readers of this edition should treat Books I to the middle of XIV as Aśvaghoṣa and the remainder as a late Nepalese continuation in a very different style. References in this guide follow Cowell's verse numbers, which differ in places from Johnston's critical text (Cowell 1893) (Cowell 1894).

Aśvaghoṣa said plainly why he wrote poetry. At the end of the Saundarananda he explains that the poem was composed not for pleasure but for the sake of peace, and that he had used the form of kāvya the way a doctor mixes a bitter medicine with honey, so that readers drawn by the sweetness would swallow the truth. The Buddhacarita works on the same principle. Its charm is real, but every ornament leads towards the teaching that all the pleasures it describes are passing, and that release from birth, old age and death is the only goal worth pursuing (Johnston 1928) (Covill 2007) (Olivelle 2008).

Plot overview

In the splendid city of Kapilavastu, King Śuddhodana of the Śākyas and his queen Māyā receive the future Buddha, who enters her womb in the form of a white elephant and is born from her side in the Lumbinī garden. He takes seven steps and announces that this is his last birth. The Brahmins foretell that he will become either a universal emperor or a Buddha, and the aged seer Asita weeps because he will not live to hear the boy's teaching. Māyā dies, and the prince is raised by her sister Gautamī. His anxious father marries him to Yaśodharā and surrounds him with every pleasure, hoping to keep him from the religious life; a son, Rāhula, is born.

When the prince drives out to the city gardens, the gods put before him an old man, a sick man and a corpse. Shaken, he refuses the advances of the women in the pleasure grove and the worldly advice of his friend Udāyin. Meditating under a rose-apple tree, he meets a mendicant who is a god in disguise and resolves to leave home. His father refuses permission, but one night the gods cast the palace women into an ungainly sleep, and the prince, disgusted by the sight, rides out on his horse Kanthaka with the groom Chandaka. In the forest he cuts off his hair, exchanges his clothes with a hunter and sends Chandaka home, where the queen, Yaśodharā and the king break into lamentation.

The prince visits ascetics who torture their bodies to win heaven and finds their aims too small. He rejects the pleas of his father's counsellor and priest, who follow him into the forest, and the offer of half a kingdom made by King Bimbisāra of Magadha, answering with a long condemnation of sensual pleasure. He studies with the teacher Arāḍa, whose doctrine of the liberated soul he finds incomplete, and with Udraka, and then practises extreme fasting for six years. Recognising that starvation is not the way, he accepts a meal of milk from the herdsman's daughter Nandabalā and sits down under the Bodhi tree, vowing not to rise until he has reached his goal.

Māra, the god of desire, attacks him first with the arrow of love and then with a monstrous army; the Bodhisattva remains unmoved, and a heavenly voice rebukes Māra, who flees. Through the three watches of the night the Bodhisattva remembers his past lives, sees the deaths and rebirths of all beings, and understands the chain of dependent origination and the four noble truths. At dawn he becomes the Buddha. Here Aśvaghoṣa's Sanskrit breaks off. In Cowell's supplementary books the Buddha spends weeks of meditation by the tree, resists Māra's daughters, travels to Vārāṇasī, preaches the first sermon to the five mendicants, gathers great disciples and returns to Kapilavastu to convert his family.

Part by part

Characters

The Buddha's family and court

Siddhārtha (the Bodhisattva, the Buddha)

The prince of the Śākyas, named Sarvārthasiddha ('he who accomplishes every aim') at birth, who becomes the Buddha. Aśvaghoṣa makes him at once a perfect kāvya hero, beautiful, royal and compared constantly to the sun, the moon, Indra and a lion, and a being who has prepared for this last life through countless ages. His inner life is shown in arguments: with Udāyin, with his father, with Chandaka, with the counsellor and priest, with Bimbisāra and with Arāḍa. He is courteous and grateful but never moved from his resolve.

Śuddhodana

King of the Śākyas at Kapilavastu, a model of righteous rule. Torn between pride in his son and fear of Asita's prophecy, he does everything to bind the prince to the palace. His collapse when Chandaka returns alone (Book VIII), compared to Daśaratha's grief for Rāma, is one of the poem's great scenes of lament.

Māyā

Śuddhodana's chief queen, whose name the poet glosses as if she were free of māyā, deceit. She bears the Bodhisattva without pain in the Lumbinī garden and dies soon after, 'unable to sustain the joy', going to heaven.

Gautamī (Mahāprajāpatī)

Māyā's sister and the king's queen, who raises the prince as her own. Her lament over his shorn hair and tender feet in Book VIII is a mother's grief; in the supplement she is among the first women to enter the order.

Yaśodharā

The prince's wife and mother of Rāhula. Her lament in Book VIII is the poem's sharpest challenge to the hero: she accuses Chandaka and Kanthaka, and asks what kind of religion abandons a lawful wife who should share her husband's merit.

Rāhula

The prince's infant son, whose birth fulfils the duty to continue the family and, by the pattern of all Bodhisattvas, frees his father to leave. He is the object of the most painful appeals to the prince.

Chandaka

The prince's groom (Cowell's Khamdaka or Khandaka), who saddles Kanthaka on the night of departure and is sent home with the prince's jewels and message. His loyalty, grief and defence of himself before Yaśodharā make him one of the most human figures in the poem.

Kanthaka

The prince's white horse (Cowell's Kamthaka), who carries him silently out of the city with the Yakṣas bearing up his hoofs. He licks his master's feet in farewell and neighs with grief on returning to the palace.

Udāyin

Son of the family priest and the prince's appointed companion, an expert in worldly policy. In Book IV he urges the women to seduce the prince and then lectures him on the uses of pleasure, citing seers and gods who yielded to love.

The counsellor and the family priest

The king's minister and priest, sent to bring the prince home (Book IX). The priest pleads the family's grief and the example of householder kings who won liberation; the minister argues that the next world is uncertain. Both are answered and turn back in tears.

Teachers and rivals

Asita

The aged seer who comes through the air to see the newborn prince, recognises the marks of a great man and weeps because he will die before hearing the Buddha's teaching. His prophecy shapes the father's fears for the rest of the poem.

Śreṇya Bimbisāra

King of Magadha at Rājagṛha, a friend of the Śākya house. He visits the young mendicant on Mount Pāṇḍava and offers him half his kingdom, setting out the classical doctrine of the three aims of life. The prince's refusal fills Book XI; in the supplement Bimbisāra becomes a lay follower.

Arāḍa Kālāma

The famous teacher of meditation whose doctrine, close to early Sāṃkhya, Aśvaghoṣa sets out at length in Book XII. He teaches the stages of contemplation that free the soul from body; the prince objects that as long as a soul remains there is no true release.

Udraka Rāmaputra

A second teacher, whose highest attainment is the state of 'neither named nor un-named'. The prince leaves him because that state too returns to the world.

The five mendicants

Ascetics who attend the Bodhisattva during his six years of fasting and leave him in contempt when he eats. In the supplement they are the first to hear his teaching at Vārāṇasī.

Nandabalā

The daughter of the chief herdsman, who, prompted by the gods, offers the starving Bodhisattva milk on the bank of the Nairañjanā. Her gift marks his turn from asceticism to the middle way.

Gods and powers

The gods of the Pure Abodes

The Śuddhādhivāsa gods, beings already free of passion, who create the old man, the sick man and the corpse, deceive the charioteer, cast the palace women into sleep and open the gates. They make the prince's awakening a matter of cosmic plan as well as personal discovery.

Māra

The lord of desire and death, identified by Aśvaghoṣa with Kāmadeva, the flower-arrowed god of love. With his sons and daughters and a grotesque army he tries to drive the Bodhisattva from his seat, and is defeated by unmoving calm. In the supplement he returns in disguise and sends his daughters again.

Kāla

The serpent king who wakes at the sound of the Bodhisattva's steps and prophesies that he will become the Buddha that very day.

Themes

Old age, sickness and death

The poem's moral world is built on the three evils the prince sees on the road. Again and again he names them together as the reason no pleasure can satisfy: if old age, disease and death did not exist, he tells Udāyin, he too would delight in the senses (4.86). What shocks him is less the facts themselves than the indifference of a world that sees them and goes on laughing.

Aśvaghoṣa turns this insight into a principle of style. Every beautiful description in the poem carries the shadow of decay, and many of the most ornate passages, such as the sleeping women of Book V, are designed to show beauty and its ruin in the same image.

Renunciation and the claims of family

The Buddhacarita does not pretend that leaving home is painless. Book VIII is given over to the grief of those left behind, and Yaśodharā's charge that her husband has abandoned his duty as a householder is never simply dismissed. The prince answers with an argument about separation: since death will part everyone in the end, a voluntary parting for the sake of release is better than one imposed by time (5.38; 6.43–48; 9.31–35).

Behind this lies a debate between Buddhism and Brahmanical dharma, which assigned religion to old age and required a man to pay his debts to ancestors, seers and gods. Aśvaghoṣa states that position fairly through the king, the priest and Bimbisāra, and then has his hero overturn it (Hiltebeitel 2011).

Desire and the senses

Desire is the enemy in every form the poem gives it: the women of the pleasure grove, Udāyin's advice, Bimbisāra's three aims of life, and finally Māra himself, whom Aśvaghoṣa identifies with Kāma, the god of love. The long series of similes in Book XI, comparing pleasures to a torch of hay, a serpent, a bone, a dream and a hot coal, is the poem's most concentrated statement of the theme.

The answer is not hatred of the world but mastery of the mind. The prince argues that the body is only a log without thought (7.27), and the true pilgrimage place is virtue, not water.

The middle way

The prince rejects pleasure in the palace and pain in the hermitages. He finds the penance of the forest ascetics aimed only at heaven, a reward that itself decays, and after six years of fasting he concludes that a starved body cannot reach calm (12.98–103). The milk of Nandabalā is the turning point.

In Cowell's supplement this becomes explicit doctrine in the first sermon's 'two extremes' (16.3–7), but in Aśvaghoṣa's own cantos it is shown through narrative: each stage rejects an extreme until the hero sits, nourished and resolved, under the tree.

Compassion and the healer

The Buddha's goal is never only his own release. Asita foresees him carrying the world across the ocean of misery in the boat of knowledge (1.75), and the heavenly voice that rebukes Māra calls him the great physician who toils for the remedy of knowledge (13.61). His first sight of the ploughed field, with insects killed by the plough, moves him to grief as for his own kindred (5.5).

The images of doctor, guide, lamp and ferryman recur through the poem and connect it with Aśvaghoṣa's description of his own poetry as medicine.

Motifs

Laments

The poem gives full scope to grief: the king after the first sights, Chandaka in the forest, the women, Gautamī, Yaśodharā and the king in Book VIII. These speeches follow the conventions of epic lament, with examples from the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, and they let the poet show the cost of renunciation before he shows its reward.

Debates and refusals

Much of the action takes the form of argument. The prince is offered pleasure, kingship, sacrifice, ascetic heaven and a doctrine of the soul, and answers each with reasoned refusal. Aśvaghoṣa, a former Brahmin, gives the opposing views real force, which makes the hero's replies the more persuasive.

Divine intervention

Gods create the four sights, bewilder the charioteer, put the women to sleep, open the gates, give the hunter's robe and carry the shorn hair to heaven. Chandaka uses these signs to argue that the departure was the ordering of fate (8.46–49).

Mythological exempla

Characters constantly argue from precedent: Udāyin lists seers who yielded to women, the priest lists householder kings who won liberation, the prince lists kings never satisfied by pleasure. The catalogues place the Buddha inside the whole Brahmanical tradition even as he leaves it.

Symbols

The house on fire

The prince tells his father that no one should hold back a man escaping from a burning house (5.37), and later says the golden palace seems to him on fire (9.41). The image, familiar from Buddhist preaching, turns the palace of pleasures into a place of danger.

The tree

Trees mark each stage of the journey: the bough Māyā grasps at the birth, the rose-apple under which the prince first meditates, the tree beneath which he answers the king's envoys, and the Bodhi tree, which the heavenly voice describes as a tree of knowledge whose fruit is the Law (13.65).

Ocean and further shore

Existence is an ocean whose waves are old age and death, and the Buddha is the boat or ferryman who carries beings across. The prince vows not to return until he has seen 'the further shore of birth and death' (5.84).

The sun and moon

The prince is compared to the sun and moon almost on every page, as kāvya convention requires for a royal hero. The comparisons also carry a doctrinal point: he is the light that will dispel the darkness of ignorance.

Critical debates

Poetry as a vehicle for doctrine

Aśvaghoṣa is unusually explicit about his purpose. The close of the Saundarananda says the poem was written for the sake of peace, not delight, and compares its poetic form to honey mixed with bitter medicine; the last canto of the Buddhacarita, preserved in Tibetan, presents the poem as an offering for the good of the world. Critics have debated whether this makes the poetry a mere sweetener, or whether Aśvaghoṣa's art is itself a means of teaching.

Linda Covill and Patrick Olivelle both stress how carefully the ornament is chosen: similes and descriptions are built so that their beauty serves the argument, and the reader is led to feel the attraction of the world before seeing through it (Covill 2007) (Olivelle 2008).

The erotic set pieces and renunciation

The women's seduction in Book IV and the sleeping women in Book V are among the most sensual passages in early Sanskrit literature. Some readers have found them at odds with a monk's poem; others see them as essential to its method. The erotic scene arouses the reader's desire, and the scene of sleep then turns the same bodies into images of disorder and death, so that the reader undergoes the prince's disillusionment rather than only hearing about it.

The prince's verdict on women in 5.64 is harsh, and modern readers have asked how far the poem's lesson about impermanence is carried by a misogynist convention inherited from Indian ascetic literature. The sympathetic treatment of Yaśodharā's grief in Book VIII complicates any simple answer (Olivelle 2008).

Aśvaghoṣa and the earlier biographies

The legend of the Buddha's life existed in many forms before Aśvaghoṣa, in the Vinaya texts of the monastic schools, in sūtras and in works such as the Mahāvastu and the Lalitavistara. The Lalitavistara in its surviving form is probably later than the Buddhacarita, but both draw on shared traditions, and comparison shows what is distinctive in Aśvaghoṣa: the gods' creation of the four sights, the long debates, the Sāṃkhya-like teaching of Arāḍa and the focus on the hero's reasoning (Thomas 1927) (Bays 1983) (Strong 2001).

Vincent Eltschinger's studies have shown how closely Aśvaghoṣa followed canonical scriptures in particular episodes, reworking sūtra and Vinaya material into kāvya while keeping its doctrinal content (Eltschinger 2013) (Eltschinger 2019).

Aśvaghoṣa and Kālidāsa

Scholars since Cowell have noticed close parallels between the two poets. The best-known is the scene of women crowding to the windows to see the prince pass (3.13–24), which has striking counterparts in Kālidāsa's Raghuvaṃśa and Kumārasaṃbhava. Most specialists think Kālidāsa knew and adapted Aśvaghoṣa, though some prefer to explain the parallels as a common stock of kāvya conventions.

The question matters for the history of Sanskrit literature: if Aśvaghoṣa already writes with mature technique, the court epic must have had a history before him that is now lost (Warder 1974) (Lienhard 1984).

The incomplete text and Cowell's manuscripts

Cowell's edition rested on recent Nepalese paper copies that included Amṛtānanda's supplement and many corruptions. Johnston, using an older palm-leaf manuscript from Nepal and the Tibetan translation, produced a far more reliable text in 1935–36 and criticised many of Cowell's readings, while acknowledging that Cowell had done what was possible with his materials. Johnston also showed that the Sanskrit original ends in Book XIV.

Readers of Cowell must therefore keep two things in mind: his text of Books I–XIV contains readings later corrected, and his Books XV–XVII are not by Aśvaghoṣa at all. The genuine later cantos survive in Tibetan and Chinese, and tell a different story, carrying the Buddha's life through his ministry, death and relics (Johnston 1984) (Cowell 1893) (Willemen 2009).

Aśvaghoṣa's date and school

The link with Kaniṣka places Aśvaghoṣa in the late first or early second century CE, and the style of the poems is consistent with that date, but the tradition is late. Even the dates of Kaniṣka himself have long been disputed.

His school affiliation is also debated. Later East Asian tradition counted him a Mahāyāna patriarch and credited him with the Awakening of Faith, a work now regarded as much later. His own poems show no clear Mahāyāna doctrine, and scholars have connected him variously with the Sarvāstivāda, the Bahuśrutika and early Yogācāra; Eltschinger's work on his canonical sources has given the debate a firmer textual base (Johnston 1984) (Eltschinger 2013) (Olivelle 2008).

Dharma: Buddhist and Brahmanical

The word dharma runs through the poem in two senses: the social and religious duty of Brahmanical law, which the king, the priest and Bimbisāra defend, and the Buddha's Law of liberation. Alf Hiltebeitel reads the Buddhacarita as a deliberate response to the Brahmanical texts on dharma and to the epics, in which Aśvaghoṣa appropriates their vocabulary and examples to argue for a higher dharma (Hiltebeitel 2011).

Olivelle similarly emphasises that the opponents' speeches are faithful to the law books, so that the poem stages a real intellectual confrontation (Olivelle 2008).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Aśvaghoṣa make the gods create the old man, the sick man and the corpse? What does this add to, or take away from, the prince's discovery?

   Compare 3.26, 3.29 and 3.56 with Chandaka's defence in 8.46–49, and think about the Bodhisattva's 'previous destiny' in 2.56.

2. How does the poem use the women of the palace in Books IV and V? Is the sleeping-women scene a condemnation of women or of desire?

   Set the images of 5.48–62 beside the prince's conclusion in 5.64–65, and then read Yaśodharā's lament in Book VIII.

3. Udāyin, the king, the priest, the minister and Bimbisāra all argue that the prince should stay. Which argument is strongest, and how does he answer it?

   Consider the three aims of life (10.28–34), the uncertainty of the next world (9.45–46) and the prince's reply in 9.63–66.

4. What does Yaśodharā's lament add to the poem? Does the poem answer her?

   Look at 8.61–68 and at the prince's message about separation in Book VI.

5. Why does the prince reject the forest ascetics and then Arāḍa? What is wrong, in his view, with each path?

   Compare 7.20–31 and 7.48 with 12.69–80; ask what kind of goal each offers.

6. How does Aśvaghoṣa present Māra? What is the effect of identifying him with the god of love?

   See 13.2–17, the grotesque army of 13.18–27 and the speech of the heavenly voice in 13.57–69.

7. Aśvaghoṣa compared his poetry to medicine mixed with honey. Find a passage in the Buddhacarita where ornament clearly serves doctrine, and one where it seems to exist for its own sake.

   Try the descriptions of Kapilavastu in Book I, the window scene in Book III and the similes of Book XI.

8. How do the similes and comparisons in the poem portray the prince? What kinds of hero do they make him resemble?

   Notice how often he is compared to Indra, the sun, a lion or an elephant, and how he is set against Rāma and other epic heroes.

9. Read the account of the enlightenment in Book XIV. How does Aśvaghoṣa turn a doctrine such as dependent origination into poetry?

   Look at the three watches of the night (14.2–9, 14.35) and the chain of conditions in 14.37–65.

10. How do Cowell's supplementary books (end of XIV to XVII) differ from Aśvaghoṣa's cantos in style and outlook?

    Compare the long epithets and lists of rewards in Book XVI and the crowded prose-like verses of Book XVII with the argument and ornament of Books III–XIII.

Further reading

• Bays, Gwendolyn, trans. The Voice of the Buddha: The Beauty of Compassion (The Lalitavistara Sūtra). 2 vols. Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 1983.
• Beal, Samuel, trans. The Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king: A Life of Buddha by Aśvaghosha Bodhisattva. Sacred Books of the East 19. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883.
• Covill, Linda, trans. Handsome Nanda by Ashva·ghosha. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2007.
• Cowell, E. B., ed. The Buddha-karita of Asvaghosha. Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan Series 1.7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893.
• Cowell, E. B., trans. 'The Buddha-karita of Asvaghosha.' In Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts, edited by E. B. Cowell, F. Max Müller and J. Takakusu. Sacred Books of the East 49. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894.
• Eltschinger, Vincent. 'Aśvaghoṣa and His Canonical Sources I: Preaching Selflessness to King Bimbisāra and the Magadhans (Buddhacarita 16.73–93).' Journal of Indian Philosophy 41 (2013): 167–94.
• Eltschinger, Vincent. 'Aśvaghoṣa and His Canonical Sources (III): The Night of Awakening (Buddhacarita 14.1–87).' Journal of Indian Philosophy 47 (2019): 195–233.
• Hiltebeitel, Alf. Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Johnston, E. H., ed. The Saundarananda of Aśvaghoṣa. London: Oxford University Press, 1928.
• Johnston, E. H., ed. and trans. The Buddhacarita, or Acts of the Buddha. 2 parts. Lahore: University of the Panjab, 1935–36. Reprint, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984.
• Lienhard, Siegfried. A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit. A History of Indian Literature 3.1. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984.
• Olivelle, Patrick, trans. Life of the Buddha by Ashva·ghosha. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2008.
• Strong, John S. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001.
• Thomas, Edward J. The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927.
• Warder, A. K. Indian Kāvya Literature. Vol. 2, Origins and Formation of the Classical Kāvya. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974.
• Willemen, Charles, trans. Buddhacarita: In Praise of Buddha's Acts. BDK English Tripiṭaka. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2009.