Lalitavistara Sutra

The Lalitavistara - Sutra is a Buddha biography of Mahayana Buddhism , which originated in the 2nd or 3rd century AD... The Lalitavistara is not the uniform work of an author, but the result of centuries of editorial activity. Young games stand next to old ones, which may approach the time of the Buddha.

The Lalitavistara is made up of episodes that have been handed down in Pali and Sanskrit. The Indologist Moritz Winternitz (1863-1937) explained this by the fact that the Lalitavistara originally goes back to a text of the Hinayan Sarvastivada school and was later revised by a Mahayan author and redesigned in the spirit of Mahayana. Shakyamuni is not represented here as an ordinary person, as in the Hinayan tradition. Rather, it is emphasized that he was endowed with perfect knowledge from the start and only apparently went through the path to knowledge again to show people the way. According to this view, the vows he made as Sumegha before Buddha Dipankara and his preparation for Buddhahood in Tushita heaven are part of the demonstration through which he shows all beings the way to Buddhahood. This docetistic position of Mahayana Buddhism was mainly strengthened by the Lotus Sutra . Due to the reshaping of the material in the sense of Mahayana, the work achieved great popularity in northern India, the area where this tradition originated. The Lalitavistara also became very popular outside of India. The text has been translated into Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian several times.

text

Salomon Lefmann (ed.): Lalita Vistara. Life and teaching of Çâkya-Buddha. Text output with list of variants, meters and words. 2 vols. Halle an der Saale, Verlag der Buchhandlung des orphanage 1902, 1908. Reprint: Meicho-Fukyu-Kai, Tokyo 1977
- Vol. 1: Text. 1902
- Vol. 2: List of variants, meters and words. 1908, digitized

Translation:

Salomon Lefmann (transl.): Lalita Vistara. Story of the life and teaching of Çâkya Sim̃ha. First translated into German from the original Sanskrit and Gâthâdialect and provided with factual explanations. Dümmler, Berlin 1874, digitized
Foucaux, Philippe-Édouard [transl.]: Histoire du Bouddha Sakya Mouni / traduite du tibétain par Ph. Éd. Foucaux, Paris: Duprat, 1860 digitized

literature

Paul Dundas : Haribhadra's Lalitavistara and the legend of Siddharsi's conversion to Jainism. In: Olle Qvarnström (Ed.): Jainism and Early Buddhism: Essays in Honor of Padmanabh S. Jaini. Asian Humanities Press, Fremont 2003, pp. 151-166.
EJ Thomas: The Lalitavistara and Sarvastivada. In: Indian Historical Quarterly 16/2 (1940), pp. 239-245, online
Friedrich Weller : To the Lalita Vistara. Dissertation Leipzig 1915.

Web links

Lalitavistara (article by Radha Banerjee, English)