Uber den Lalita Vistara (Oldenberg 1882)
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Uber den Lalita Vistara
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Description
In "Über den Lalita Vistara," Hermann Oldenberg examines the relationship between the Lalita Vistara—the well-known northern Buddhist biography of the Buddha—and the older biographical material embedded in the Pāli canon. He argues that the Pāli canon originally contained no continuous life of the Buddha, only scattered biographical fragments woven into doctrinal and monastic-rule narratives, along with a handful of old, spare "Buddha songs" preserved in texts like the Sutta-nipāta.
Oldenberg proposes that the Lalita Vistara represents the crystallization of these older songs and narrative fragments into a continuous "Buddha epic"—comparable to how the Iliad or Nibelungenlied grew from individual songs — but with the difference that the underlying Pāli sources remain directly recoverable for comparison. Through detailed textual parallels, he shows that a substantial layer of the Lalita Vistara's prose closely reproduces old Pāli tradition, while its metrical (gāthā) portions largely reflect much later, Sanskritized compositional layers built on an underlying Prākrit. An appendix offers a parallel passage from the Mahāsaccakasutta for comparison with the Lalita Vistara.
Citation
Oldenberg, Hermann. "Uber den Lalita Vistara." In Verhandlungen des fünften Internationalen Orientalisten-Congresses, gehalten zu Berlin im September 1881, Vol. 2, pt. 2, 107–22. Berlin: Asher, 1882.
Interconnections
1 Scholarship on
The Play in Full tells the story of how the Buddha manifested in this world and attained awakening, as perceived from the perspective of the Great Vehicle. The sūtra, which is structured in twenty-seven chapters, first presents the events surrounding the Buddha’s birth, childhood, and adolescence in the royal palace of his father, king of the Śākya nation. It then recounts his escape from the palace and the years of hardship he faced in his quest for spiritual awakening. Finally the sūtra reveals his complete victory over the demon Māra, his attainment of awakening under the Bodhi tree, his first turning of the wheel of Dharma, and the formation of the very early saṅgha. (Source: 84000)
