Asvaghosha

Asvaghosha was a Buddhist poet, playwright and philosopher who is said to have flourished at the court of the Kushan king Kanishka in the first or second century AD. Tradition holds that he was born a Brahman and was converted to Buddhism; his dates and the details of his life rest on later Chinese and Tibetan reports and remain uncertain.

He is the author of the Buddhacarita, the Life of the Buddha, the earliest surviving Sanskrit court epic (mahakavya) on that subject, which follows the Buddha from his birth at Kapilavastu to his enlightenment and first teaching. Only about the first half of the Sanskrit text survives; the remainder is known from Tibetan and Chinese versions, and E. B. Cowell's English translation of 1894 supplies the closing books from the Chinese and Tibetan.