Buddhacarita — Translation Notes

These notes record the translation decisions made for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Buddhacarita (佛所行讚), Taishō T0192, Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit court epic on the life of the Buddha, translated into Chinese by Dharmakṣema (曇無讖) in the early 5th century for the Northern Liang court. They exist so that vocabulary and convention stay consistent across all forty-three parts, and so that the reasoning behind this collection’s departures from precedent (most notably its approach to reading notes) is recorded for later readers.

The text, and why only this version

Three verse and prose lives of the Buddha survive in the Chinese canon with overlapping content: the Fo Benxing Ji Jing (佛本行集經, T0190, 60 fascicles, a much longer prose compilation), the Buddhacarita itself (佛所行讚, T0192, Dharmakṣema’s translation of Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit poem, the text translated here), and the Fo Benxing Jing (佛本行經, T0193, attributed to Baoyun, an independent verse translation covering similar ground). This collection translates only T0192 — the text Chinese Buddhist literary tradition has always meant when it refers to “the Buddhacarita,” and the closest surviving Chinese witness to Aśvaghoṣa’s own Sanskrit kāvya. T0190 and T0193 are not covered here, and were deliberately checked against at the outset of this project to make sure no line was accidentally translated from the wrong source file.

The base text runs to roughly 46,800 Chinese characters across five fascicles (卷) and twenty-eight numbered chapters (品), not counting the fascicle-boundary colophons (translator credit, restated between each of the five 卷) that recur at the start of fascicles two through five. These colophons are not part of the root verse text and are not translated, in keeping with this site’s convention for front matter and fascicle boundaries established in the Laṅkāvatāra collection.

Why this collection’s reading notes differ from precedent

Every other multi-part collection on this site that includes reading notes grounds them in a named historical commentator — Zongle and Ruqi for the Laṅkāvatāra, Fazang for the Dasheng Qixin Lun, and so on. The Buddhacarita has no such commentary tradition behind it. It belongs to Taishō’s 本緣部 (the “root-story” division, narrative and biographical literature), not to the doctrinal canon that Chinese monk-scholars wrote line-by-line exegesis on. A search of CBETA and standard reference works confirms this directly: no premodern Chinese Buddhist commentator is known to have written a formal 科判 (structural outline) or 註解 (line commentary) on either T0192 or its Sanskrit original. Aśvaghoṣa composed the poem as literature — kāvya, the ornamented court poetry of classical India — not as a treatise inviting scholastic exegesis, and the Chinese tradition appears to have received it and read it in that same spirit.

Rather than force an “after [commentator]” framing onto a text with no commentator to cite, this collection adopts a hybrid approach, stated plainly to the reader at the top of the collection index and repeated here:

• The great majority of pages are pure bilingual translation, with no note-box at all. Most of the poem is narrative — the birth, the palace years, the four sights, the journey home, the funeral — and needed no added commentary beyond what the translation itself carries.
• Six chapters of unusual doctrinal density carry original reading notes, each explicitly headed “Reading note — Ru-Yi Meditation Center,” never framed as “after” any historical figure. These notes draw on comparison with the Pali canon’s own parallel accounts (the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Padhānasutta, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta) and on the poem’s own internal structure and literary technique, rather than inventing a fictional commentarial voice.

The six chapters carrying original reading notes, and why each was chosen:

Structure

Total: 46,385 characters of root verse text (46,824 including punctuation and the 品/卷 heading markers), verified in full against the base text via a depth-counted extraction of every page’s source column, diffed with difflib.SequenceMatcher against the base text — 100% coverage, no gaps, confirmed both per-page, per-chapter, per-fascicle, and finally across the whole poem in a single merged check.

Core terminology

A note on genuinely obscure proper names

Two chapters — 21 (守財醉象調伏品, the long teaching itinerary) and 28 (分舍利品, the account of the seven kings and their armies) — contain strings of transliterated proper names for minor towns, local spirits, and secondary historical figures that do not correspond cleanly to any well-attested Sanskrit or Pali form. Where an identification is reasonably certain (major disciples, well-known place names, figures independently attested in the Pali canon or epic literature), this collection uses the standard reconstructed Sanskrit form. Where a name’s referent is genuinely uncertain — a handful of spirits and local rulers in the Chapter 21 itinerary, and a few of the epic-allusion names in Chapter 28’s speech comparing the relic dispute to the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa — this collection offers its own best-effort phonetic reconstruction rather than leaving the name untranslated or inventing false certainty about its identity. These are flagged here rather than silently presented as settled scholarship.

A note for future texts in this genre

This is the first narrative/biographical (本緣部) text translated for this site, as opposed to the doctrinal sūtras, śāstras, and commentaries that make up the rest of the collection. The hybrid reading-notes approach developed here — plain bilingual translation as the default, with original notes reserved for a small number of doctrinally dense passages and always attributed honestly to Ru-Yi Meditation Center rather than a fictional “after X” — is offered as a template for any future biographical or narrative text (such as T0190 or T0193, should this site ever take them up) that likewise lacks a premodern commentarial tradition to draw on.