AVAD?NA

As a genre of Buddhist literature, the Sanskrit term avad?na (P?li, apad?na; Chinese, piyu; Tibetan, rtogs par brjod pa's sde) denotes a narrative of an individual's religiously significant deeds. Often these narratives constitute full-fledged religious biographies, sometimes of eminent monastics, sometimes of ordinary lay disciples. The avad?nas portray, frequently with thematic and narrative complexity, concrete human actions that embody the truths propounded in the doctrine (dharma) and the discipline (vinaya).

Avad?nas range from formulaic tales that simply dramatize the workings of karma (action) and the efficacy of faith and devotion, to fantastical adventure stories, to the sophisticated art of virtuosi poets. Like modern novels and short stories, avad?nas offer something for every taste. The avad?na literature draws on diverse sources: actual lives, the biography of the Buddha and tales of his former births (j?taka), biographical accounts in the canonical literature, and the vast, pan-Indian store of secular story-literature. Indian Buddhists composed avad?nas from about the second century b.c.e. to the thirteenth century c.e. Thereafter, Buddhists elsewhere in Asia continued the tradition. In India and beyond, avad?na stories also inspired narrative painting.

Structurally, avad?nas, like j?takas (which came to be considered a subcategory of avad?na), consist of a story of the present (pratyutpannavastu), a story of the past (at?tavastu), and a juncture (samavadh?na) in which the narrator, always the Buddha or another enlightened saint, identifies characters in the past as former births of characters in the present. For the story of the past, some avad?nas substitute a prediction (vy?kara?a) of the protagonist's spiritual destiny.

The earliest avad?nas, like the Apad?na and the Sthav?r?vad?na (ca. second century b.c.e.), are autobiographical narratives in verse attributed to the Buddha's immediate disciples. In contrast, biographical anthologies from the first to the fourth centuries c.e., such as the Avad?na?ataka (A Hundred Glorious Deeds), Karma?ataka (A Hundred Karma Tales), and Divy?vad?na (Heavenly Exploits), are in mixed prose and verse and feature a much wider range of characters. The Avad?na?ataka stories are brief and formulaic, those of the Karma?ataka less so, and those of the Divy?vad?na the most complex and diverse. The sixth-to eighth-century P?li commentaries (a??hakath?) and several collections preserved only in Chinese contain many avad?na and avad?na-type stories.

Just as Hindu poets retold stories of heroes from the epics and Pur??as, Buddhist poets retold the lives of their own heroes. The second-century Kum?ral?ta, in his Kalpan?ma??itika D????ntapa?kti (A Collection of Parables Ornamented by the Imagination), first adapted the prose-and-verse format to the demands of belles lettres. His successors from the fourth to the eighth centuries, ?rya??ra, Haribha??a, and Gopadatta, composed ornate poetry (k?vya) in the form of bodhisattv?vad?nam?l?s (garlands of avad?nas concerning the Buddha's previous births). Similarly, the eleventh-century Hindu poet K?emendra drew on the M?lasarv?stiv?da Vinaya to compose the Bodhisattv?vad?na-kalpalat?, which became important in Nepal and Tibet.

The mostly unpublished verse avad?nam?l?s (garlands of avad?nas), which constitute a later subgenre, are anonymous works, composed in the style of Hindu Pur??as, that display Mah?y?na influences. Several of these retell stories from earlier sources, some in a distinctively Nepalese idiom.

As scholars increasingly recognize narrative as a mode of knowing distinct from, but in no way inferior to, philosophical discourse, they can look forward to learning much from a literary genre that has played an essential role in Buddhist self-understanding for more than two thousand years.

See also:Sanskrit, Buddhist Literature in

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Joel Tatelman