The question of whether Paramārtha's version of the
Awakening of Faith in Mahayana (AFM)[1] may really be a Chinese composition has long intrigued scholars of Buddhism. Because no original Sanskrit manuscript of the
AFM has ever been found nor any reference to the
AFM discovered in any Buddhist text composed in India, scholars have long suspected that the
AFM might not be a Chinese translation of an Indian work. The traditional attribution of the text to Aśvaghoṣa is even more suspect—as Paul Demiéville pointed out, it is almost impossible to believe that the Aśvaghoṣa whom one associates with the
Buddhacarita, the
Mahāvibhāṣā, and the Sarvāstivadins could have composed any
Mahāyāna text, much less a sophisticated
Mahāyāna treatise like the
AFM.
[2] And the discovery at the beginning of this century of Japanese references to the seventh century Buddhist figure Hui-chun, who is quoted as saying that the
AFM was composed not by Aśvaghoṣa, but by a "prisoner of war" who belonged to the
T'i lun School,
[3] prompted many distinguished scholars, including Shinko Mochizuki and Walter Liebenthal, to argue that the work was a Chinese fabrication by a person affiliated with the native Chinese
T'i lun School, which devoted itself to the study of Vasubandhu's
Daśabhūmivyākhyā.
[4] Indeed, as recently as 1958, Liebenthal went so far as to say that one could take it as "established" that a member of the
T'i lun School composed the
AFM.
[5] Few would go so far as actually to name the member of the
T'i lun School who wrote the
AFM, as Liebenthal did (indeed, as Liebenthal himself remarked, it is difficult to believe that any member of the
T'i lun School could have written the
AFM, given that the author of the
AFM does not even seem to know the ten
bodhisattvabhūmis described in the
Daśabhūmivyākhya),
[6] but for a long time scholarly opinion has leaned in the direction of assigning authorship of the
AFM to the Chinese. Just recently Professor Whalen Lai has brought forward some cogent new reasons for regarding the
AFM as a Chinese composition.
[7] In light of all this, it might seem rather daring to suggest that an Indian actually composed the
AFM, but that is what I propose to argue. I do not intend to suggest that the Sarvāstivādin Aśvaghoṣa, or even a "
Mahāyāna Aśvaghoṣa" composed the
AFM. The first place that any Aśvaghoṣa is listed as the author of the text is in Hui-yüan's
Ta-ch'êng i chang, a work composed about a half century after Paramārtha was said to have translated the
AFM, so the attribution of the text to Aśvaghoṣa probably postdated its composition. But there are a couple of pieces of important philological evidence, heretofore largely overlooked, that seem to point strongly to an Indian Buddhist, most likely Paramārtha himself, as the real author of the text, or at least of major parts of it
[8] The first piece of evidence is the use in the
AFM of the three categories of
t'i,
hsiang, and
yung, categories which I will try to show were derived by the author of the
AFM from Sanskrit categories used in the
Ratnagotravibhāgamahāyānottaratantraśāstra (RGV) and which could not have been formulated by anyone who did not possess a knowledge of Sanskrit. The second piece of evidence is Paramārtha's interpolation of passages from the
RGV into the
Mahāyānasaṃgrahabhāṣya (MSbh), which seems to show not only that Paramārtha was intimately familiar with the
RGV and its categories, but also that he was personally concerned about issues central to the
AFM. When examined together with some interesting biographical details from accounts of Paramārtha's life, this evidence seems to suggest the very real possibility that Paramārtha was the author of the
AFM. (Grosnick, introduction, 65–66)
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