CHAPTER XI

AS'VAGHOSHA

EVERYBODY in Japan reckons As'vaghosha as the founder of the Mahayana Faith, and yet there is not a single Mahayana sect in Japan which traces its official lineage back to him. They all go back to Nagarjuna, who is made to be responsible for very great varieties of doctrine; and one or two of them will then add, in a parenthetic and half apologetic manner, that As'vaghosha said something of the sort.

The Zen teachers give him in their list of Patriarchs of the Mahayana, but do not in any way treat him as one of the pivots of their system. The mystic Kegon, now practically non-existent, spoke of As'vaghosha as their founder, in the sense that the germ of their teachings may be found in him who first roused his fellow-religionists to faith in the Mahayana, then coming into the world; but their doctrines they derived, through Nagarjuna, from some mysterious books said to have been brought by that saint from some "Dragon's palace under the sea." And the believers in salvation by faith in the vow of Amida,

while acknowledging that the first signs of that faith are to be found in As'vaghosha's treatise, yet make Nagarjuna the first in their list of Patriarchs.

There is a great deal of uncertainty about As'vaghosha's life. His advent is said to have been foretold by Buddha himself, but Suzuki, who has written a very full and candid account of As'vaghosha, quotes a passage from a book claiming to be written by Nagarjuna, in which it is stated that, in order to fulfil all the prophecies concerning him, there must have been six As'vaghoshas, each of whom "appeared to fulfil his mission according to the necessity of the time, and there is no contradiction in them." (Nagarjuna's book was translated into Chinese in A.D. 401.) According to the first of these prophecies, As'vaghosha had been a disciple of Buddha in his earthly life. When the Buddha was telling his disciples of his approaching Nirvana, he had asked to accompany him, and then, "gazing at the pupil of Buddha's eye, had passed out of life." In the next prophecy, Buddha is said to have told As'vaghosha that three hundred years after the Nirvana, he would obtain an inspiration from him which would be for the happiness of mankind. According to another, he was to come six hundred years after the Nirvana to confute the heretics. A fourth prophecy places him in the eighth century after the Nirvana; a fifth brings him back to one hundred years. A sixth represents him as having appeared to Buddha, seventeen days after his Enlightenment, in the form of a monster serpent with 86,000 heads and 86,000 tongues, and to have asked the Tathagata 86,000 questions all at once. This sixth legend was evidently invented to bolster up the pretended revelations of the Kegon Scriptures,