The Buddhacarita.
Composed by the Buddhist monk and Sanskrit court poet Aśvaghoṣa around the 2nd century CE, the Buddhacarita is not a doctrinal treatise but an epic — kāvya, the ornamented poetry of the Indian royal courts, turned to tell the Buddha's own life story from birth to the distribution of his relics after death. Dharmakṣema's Chinese verse translation, made in the early 5th century for the Northern Liang court, is itself a landmark of Chinese Buddhist literature. This collection translates the whole of it across forty-three pages: the birth at Lumbinī, the four sights that undid a sheltered childhood, the great departure over the palace wall, six years of futile asceticism, the defeat of Māra, the night of awakening, the first turning of the Dharma wheel, four decades of teaching, and the final nirvāṇa at Kuśinagara.
How to read this collection
The Chinese canon preserves several verse lives of the Buddha; this collection translates only T0192, Dharmakṣema's version of Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita — the text Chinese Buddhist tradition has always read as the classical poetic biography, distinct from the much longer prose Fo Benxing Ji Jing (T0190, 佛本行集經, 60 fascicles) and from the alternate verse translation attributed to Baoyun, the Fo Benxing Jing (T0193, 佛本行經). The base text runs to roughly 46,800 Chinese characters across five fascicles and twenty-eight chapters, read here across forty-three pages.
Each page carries the base text in its original five-character verse form beside Ru-Yi's English translation, rendered as narrative poetic prose rather than a line-by-line crib — meant to be read for its own rhythm, not simply construed. Most pages are pure translation with no added commentary; a handful of the poem's doctrinally densest chapters carry original reading notes, explained below.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified character-for-character against the base text for full coverage.
- Original reading notes at six chapters of particular doctrinal density, each explicitly attributed to Ru-Yi Meditation Center rather than any historical commentator — see below for why.
- CBETA's own textual variants and interlinear annotations preserved exactly as transmitted, never silently corrected.
- American spelling throughout, matching this site's house convention.
The Sūtra's Five Fascicles
Dharmakṣema's translation divides into five fascicles covering twenty-eight named chapters (品), tracing the Buddha's life in strict chronological order from his birth to the enshrinement of his relics.
Read by Part
All forty-three parts are translated. An asterisk (*) marks the six parts that carry an original reading note.
Fascicle 1
佛所行讚卷第一 · Chapters 1–5 · Parts 1–7Fascicle 2
佛所行讚卷第二 · Chapters 6–9 · Parts 8–13Fascicle 3
佛所行讚卷第三 · Chapters 10–15 · Parts 14–23Fascicle 4
佛所行讚卷第四 · Chapters 16–22 · Parts 24–32Fascicle 5
佛所行讚卷第五 · Chapters 23–28 · Parts 33–43Translation Notes
The Buddhacarita is a literary epic, not a doctrinal treatise, and no premodern Chinese commentator wrote a line-by-line exegesis of it the way commentators did for texts like the Laṅkāvatāra or the Awakening of Faith. This collection's own approach to reading notes, its terminology decisions, and the reasoning behind them are recorded in full in the complete translation notes, and also in this site's note on translation method.