Lalitavistara Sūtra
| Translations of Lalitavistara Sūtra |
|
|---|---|
| English | The Extensive Play |
| Sanskrit | Lalitavistara Sūtra |
| Chinese |
普曜經 (Pinyin: Pǔyào Jīng) |
| Tibetan |
རྒྱ་ཆེར་རོལ་པ་ (Wylie: rgya cher rol pa) |
| Glossary of Buddhism | |
The Lalitavistara Sūtra is a Mahayana Buddhist sutra that tells the story of Gautama Buddha from the time of his descent from Tushita until his first sermon in the Deer Park near Varanasi. The term Lalitavistara has been translated "The Play in Full" or "Extensive Play," referring to the Mahayana view that the Buddha’s last incarnation was a "display" or "performance" given for the benefit of the beings in this world.
The sutra consists of twenty-seven chapters:
The story ends at the very moment when the Buddha has finally manifested all the qualities of awakening and is fully equipped to influence the world, as he did over the next forty-five years by continuously teaching the Dharma and establishing his community of followers.
The Borobudur reliefs contain a series of panels depicting the life of the Buddha as described in the Lalitavistara Sutra. In these reliefs, the story starts from the glorious descent of the Buddha from the Tushita heaven, and ends with his first sermon in the Deer Park.
As an example of how widely the sutra was disseminated, the Lalitavistara Sutra was known to the Mantranaya (Vajrayana) practitioners of Borobudur, who had the text illustrated by stonemasons.
In the early 20th century, P. L. Vaidya believed that the finished Sanskrit text dated to the 3rd century A.D.
The text is also said to be a compilation of various works by no single author and includes materials from the Sarvastivada and the Mahayana traditions.
Concerning the origins of the text, the Dharmachakra Translation Committee states:
Foucaux, Édouard. Le Lalitavistara : l’histoire traditionnelle de la vie du Bouddha Çakyamuni. Les Classiques du bouddhisme mahāyāna, Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, vol. 19. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1892.
In the Lalitavistara, the Buddha explains to a mathematician named Arjuna the system of numerals in multiples of 100, starting from a koti (in later literature 10^7 but this is uncertain) to a tallakshana (10^53 then).
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