THE AV AD AN AS 65
believed wholeheartedly in the efficacy of any act of devotion to the Buddha or his followers as having the power to influence indefinitely for good the life of man; equally they held that an insult to the Buddha was certain to bear appalling fruit. Of the Avadana texts preserved the oldest may be the Avadanagataka}- which is stated to have been rendered into Chinese in the first half of the third century A.D., and which, as containing the term dlnara, can hardly belong to any period earlier than A.£>. 100. Artistically the work has scanty merit ; its arrangement in ten decades each according to subject-matter is schematic ; the tales open with set formulae, contain set formulae of description, as of the laughter of the Buddha, and of moral exhortation ; exaggera- tion and long-windedness mark the whole, and beauty of form is sacrificed to the desire to be edifying. From this point of view, indeed, the tales often reveal thoughts of some beauty ; Maitra- kanyaka, condemned for wrongs done to his mother to endure in hell the punishment of bearing on his head a, wheel of red-hot iron for 66,000 years until another who has committed a like sin comes to relieve him of his burden, resolves that rather will he for ever and ever endure the pain, and is rewarded forthwith by the disappearance of the instrument of torment. QrimatI, wife of Bimbisara, pays homage to the relics of the Buddha which the king had enclosed in a Stupa for worship by the ladies of his harem ; the parricide Ajatacatru forbids such homage on pain of death, but C/rimatl disobeys, and, slain by the king's order, is born again in the world of the gods.
Far more interesting as literature is the Divyavadana, 2 a col- lection of legends which draws, like the Avadanagataka, largely on the Vinayapitaka of the Sarva^tivaditi school of Buddhism. Its date is uncertain ; its origin is complex ; one section is definitely described as a Mahayana Sutra, while the body of the work is still of the Hinayana school. The term dlnara occurs, and one famous tale, the Cjirdulakarnavadana, was rendered into Chinese in A.D. 465. It tells how the Buddha by his skill in persuasion converted to the faith the maiden Prakrti, who had con- ceived a deep love for the beloved disciple Ananda and would have won him from his vows, had he not at the moment of his greatest
1 Ed. J. S. Speyer, BB. 3, 1902-9; trans. L. Feer, AMG 18, 1891.
2 Ed. E. B. Covvell and K. A. Neil, Cambridge, 1886. sw F
