Avadana

avadana 阿波陀那 (Skt; Jpn abadana )

One of the twelve divisions of the Buddhist teachings. It refers to those parts of the sutras relating parables, allegories, or stories that help the understanding of the doctrines.

Avadana also indicates the stories of the previous lives of Shakyamuni's monk-disciples and lay follower.

As a genre of Buddhist literature, the Sanskrit term avadana Pali, apadana; Chinese, piyu; Tibetan, rtogs par brjod pa’s sde) denotes a narrative of an individual’s religiously significant deeds.

Often these narratives constitute full-fledged religious biographies, sometimes of eminent monastics, sometimes of ordinary lay disciples.

The avadanas portray, frequently with thematic and narrative complexity, concrete human actions that embody the truths propounded in the doctrine (dharma) and the discipline (VINAYA).

Avadanas range from formulaic tales that simply dramatize the workings of KARMA (ACTION) and the efficacy of FAITH and devotion, to fantastical adventure stories, to the sophisticated art of virtuosi poets.

Like modern novels and short stories, avadanas offer something for every taste.

The avadana literature draws on diverse sources: actual lives, the biography of the Buddha and tales of his former births (JATAKA), biographical accounts in the canonical literature, and the vast, pan-Indian store of secular story-literature.

Indian Buddhists composed avadanas from about the second century B.C.E. to the thirteenth century C.E. Thereafter, Buddhists elsewhere in Asia continued the tradition.

In India and beyond, avadana stories also inspired narrative painting.

Structurally, avadanas, like jatakas (which came to be considered a subcategory of avadana), consist of a story of the present (pratyutpannavastu), a story of the past (atltavastu), and a juncture (samavadhana) in which the narrator, always the Buddha or another enlightened saint, identifies characters in the past as former births of characters in the present.

For the story of the past, some avadanas substitute a prediction (vyakarana) of the protagonist’s spiritual destiny.

The earliest avadanas, like the Apadana and the Sthavlravadana (ca. second century B.C.E.), are autobi-ographical narratives in verse attributed to the Buddha’s immediate disciples.

In contrast, biographical anthologies from the first to the fourth centuries C.E., such as the AVADANASATAKA (A Hundred Glorious Deeds), Karmasataka (A Hundred Karma Tales), and DIVYAVADANA (Heavenly Exploits), are in mixed prose and verse and feature a much wider range of characters.

The Avadanasataka stories are brief and formulaic, those of the Karmasataka less so, and those of the Divyavadana the most complex and diverse.

The sixth-to eighth-century Pali commentaries (atthakatha) and several collections preserved only in Chinese contain many avadana and avadana-type stories.

Just as Hindu poets retold stories of heroes from the epics and Puranas, Buddhist poets retold the lives of their own heroes.

The second-century Kumaralata, in his Kalpanaman ditika Drstantapan˙kti (A Collection of Parables Ornamented by the Imagination), first adapted the prose-and-verse format to the demands of belles lettres.

His successors from the fourth to the eighth centuries, ARYASURA, Haribhatta, and Gopa-datta, composed ornate poetry (kavya) in the form of bodhisattvavadanamalas (garlands of avadanas concerning the Buddha’s previous births).

Similarly, the eleventh-century Hindu poet Ksemendra drew on the MULASARVASTIVADA VINAYA to compose the Bodhisattvavadana-kalpalata, which became important in Nepal and Tibet.

The mostly unpublished verse avadanamalas (garlands of avadanas), which constitute a later subgenre, are anonymous works, composed in the style of Hindu Puranas, that display MAHAYANA influences. S

everal of these retell stories from earlier sources, some in a distinctively Nepalese idiom.

As scholars increasingly recognize narrative as a mode of knowing distinct from, but in no way inferior to, philosophical discourse, they can look forward to learning much from a literary genre that has played an essential role in Buddhist self-understanding for more than two thousand years.

See also: Sanskrit, Buddhist Literature

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