Avadānas
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Called “apadāna” in Pali, these are mostly rebirth stories about people other than the Buddha: most notably the past-life biographies of the great disciples.
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Books (5)
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The only complete translation of the Pāli Apadāna.
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This dissertation offers a comprehensive treatment of the textual sources of the Nandimitrāvadāna, a Buddhist narrative which is deemed an authoritative source for the cult of the Elders or Arhats in Central and East Asia.
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Readings (19)
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This paper presents an annotated English translation of the story of the nun Dharmadinnā, translated here for the first time from the Tibetan translation of the Kṣudrakavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. The protagonist is not able to enter the religious life because of her prenatal engagement and is finally ordained by an exceptional style of ordination ceremony performed through a messenger.
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A general introduction to the collection.
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A couple pages from the first century BCE containing summaries of eleven Avadāna stories, including one authorizing the use of magic seals and one on the practice of self-immolation.
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Despite its richness as a source for one of the lost schools of Indian Buddhism (the Sarvāstivāda), and its potential contributions to our understanding of the development of narrative and ideology in early Buddhism more generally, the Avadānaśataka has never been fully translated into English.
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This article is a comparison and translation of a story found in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, preserved in both Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts.
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Surveying pre-Gupta inscriptions, it becomes clear that the aspiration for nirvana has one recurring feature attached to it; the aspiration of the donor for the attainment of nirvana occurs when the donation is connected in some way or another to the relics or figural or non-figural representations of the historical Buddha.
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The Buddhāpadāna further develops the concept of Buddha-field, in that it speaks of innumerable Buddha-fields in all ten directions in the multiverse. Thus the Apadānas clearly show the line of development from the concept of merit-field in the early Suttas to the Pure Land systems of later Mahāyāna.
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Their presence in an avadāna collection forces us to reflect upon what it might mean to be both a jātaka and an avadāna.
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For most of the women who became foremost leading disciples, or etadagga sāvikā, of the Buddha Gotama, it was not only their meeting with a past buddha, but also their seeing the Buddha together with an awakened woman, a leading bhikkhunī disciple of the Buddha, that truly stimulated their inspiration and galvanized their aspiration.
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Visiting the caves of Ajanta in October 1969, I had the pleasure to identify another artistic representation of the Sudhana story.
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