Customer Reviews

A real inspiration to go back to the source - By: M. A. Cross, 18 Oct 2008
I remember like yesterday the excitement I feltin the summer of 1986 when I first began to read the teaching of a true buddha-ancestorin his own original words. At that time the ancestorin question was Zen Master Dogen, & the textin question was his masterwork Shobogenzo, writtenin a combination of Chinese characters & Japanese kana. In the past couple of weeks I have experienced the same excitement again, thanks to the publication by the Clay Sanskrit Library of this book, along with the other of Ashvaghosha's surviving works, Saundarananda, or "Handsome Nanda."

Having got my hands on these two books, I have found myself drawn back to my copy of Teach Yourself Sanskrit by Michael Coulson, which has lain heavily on my shelf for nearly 20 years. Without the carrot of a penetrable & accessible Sanskrit text by a revered author, this donkey could not apply his mind to the proper means of Sanskrit study. But now, gripped by the truth of Ashva-ghoshas's words, which seem to reach out of the page & grab me even though I recognize only a few of them, I know that my study of Sanskritin earnest has already started.

If, like me, you are inspired by the existence of these two books to start studying Ashva-ghosha's wordsin their original Sanskrit, then this one, Buddhacarita, Life of the Buddha, is probably the one to start with. Because the English translation is evidently very faithful to the original, & because it isin the form of four-line verses, one can soon begin to recognize, even without the bother of looking everything upin a dictionary, which Sanskrit words correspond to which English words on the facing page.

Thusin Canto 12.205, Patrick Olivelle has:

Mental concentration springs up
when one's mind is well & serene,
And practice of trance advances
when concentration grips one's mind.

This seems to me to be a strikingly good translation -- one that indeed springs up off the page & grips one's mind.

But the fact that I have the four lines of Sanskrit on the facing page enables me to see that "mental concentration" & "concentration" are translations of samadhi, & "trance" is a translation of "dhyana." I am therefore enabled if I wish to revise Patrick Olivelle's translation more to my own liking:

When one's mind is well & serene,
Stillness springs up,
And stillness grips one's mind,
So that meditation practice progresses...

Or (after a few more weeks of Sanskrit study inspired by this publication):

When the mind is well & serene,
Physical balance asserts itself;
And when balance isin the harness of intelligence,
Zen practice gets going.


Aided by this treasure of a book, may samadhi spring up & grip us all.