पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१०४

72 AÇVAGHOȘA AND EARLY BUDDHIST KĀVYA Buddhist faith, has a predecessor in the Suhṛllekha¹ of Nāgār- juna, in which he summarizes Buddhist doctrine for a king, unhappily unidentified. The Subhāṣitāvali cites a verse actually found in the letter, though omitted in the Tibetan version: visasya viṣayāṇāṁ ca dūram atyantam antaram upabhuktam visam hanti viṣayāḥ smaraṇād api. 'Vast indeed the difference between poison and objects of sense; poison slays only when tasted, but the things of sense by mere thought thereof.' The name of the author is given in the text as Candragopin, but on the whole it is improbable that he is to be distinguished from Candragomin, and we may place him in the seventh century A.D., as his grammar was used in the Kāçikā Vrtti, while he seems to have been alive as late as the time of I-tsing, though his reference is not free from doubt. As might be expected from a grammarian, the poem is written in correct and fluent Sanskrit, but without special distinction. The case is other with Çantideva, author of the laborious com- pendium of Buddhist dogmatics of the Mahāyāna school, the Çikṣāsamuccaya, in his Bodhicaryavatāra, in which he sketches the career of him who seeks to attain Buddhahood as opposed to the narrow Hinayāna ideal of saintship. Çantideva, who lived in the seventh century and whom tradition alleges to have been the son of a king who was induced by the goddess Tārā to lay aside royal state, disclaims any literary pretension; he writes for himself only and for those of nature akin to his. His poem is a strange blend of passionate devotion to the aim of aiding men to achieve freedom from the miseries of life coupled with the utter negativism of the Mahāyāna philosophy. There is nothing real, nothing can be gained or lost, none honoured or despised; joy and sorrow, love and hate, all are idle names, without reality; search as you will, nothing can be found that is. None the less Çantideva seems to be intoxicated with the nobility of the aim of seeking to be a saviour of mankind; the good we do in our efforts is a joy to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas; we are allied with them in the struggle to attain the end. It is a delusion by 1 Trans. H. Wenzel, JPTS. 1886, pp. 1 ff.; for the king Satavahana, cf. Vidyabhu- sana, POCP. 1919, i. 125. 3īd. de la Vallée Poussin, BI. 1901 ff.; trans. Paris, 1907. 8