Mahāvastu

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mahavastu, whose Sanskrit name translates as "Great Event" or "Great Story," is one of the oldest surviving multi-life accounts of the Buddha Shakyamuni. It belongs to the Mahāsāṃghika Lokottaravāda school of Early Buddhism, and it was originally embedded within that school's Vinaya pitaka, the monastic rule-code. What makes this text so unusual is that it is not a single composition. Scholars have identified numerous textual layers accumulated over roughly six centuries, from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE. How does a text grow across so many centuries, and what kind of portrait of the Buddha emerges from these accumulated layers? Those are the questions this documentary will trace.

• 2. A Text Built in Layers

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  The Mahavastu opens with two distinct prologues, called nidanas. Scholars date the first of these, the Nidananamaskāras, to around the 3rd century CE. The second, the Nidanavastu, is earlier, placed at roughly the 1st century CE. That alone tells us the text was not composed at a single sitting but assembled across generations. Over half of the total work is composed of Jataka and Avadana tales, accounts of the earlier lives of the Buddha and of other bodhisattvas. The Jataka tales in the Mahavastu resemble those found in the Pali Canon, but significant differences exist in the details of individual stories. Other passages have closer parallels with specific Pali texts, including the Digha Nikaya's Mahāgovinda Sutta and the Sutta Nipata's Pabbajja Sutta and Padhana Sutta. The most recently added layer is the Daśabhūmika, a text dealing with a scheme of bodhisattva stages. According to scholar Vincent Tournier, this text was grafted into the Mahavastu during its final period of formation, roughly the 4th through 6th centuries CE. It seems to have begun as an appendix before finding its way into the body of the work itself, a pattern that also occurred with a second text called the Avalokitasutra, which shows similarities with Mahayana scriptures.

• 3. The Transcendent Buddha

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  A central preoccupation of the Mahavastu is the nature of the Buddha himself, specifically the notion that the Buddha is a lokottara, or transcendent, figure. This idea is central to all schools within the Mahasanghika tradition. The text describes a Buddha who, over the course of many lives, developed abilities that place him beyond ordinary human experience: a painless birth conceived without intercourse, no need for sleep, food, medicine, or bathing, omniscience, and the ability to suppress karma. When the Buddha did eat or sleep, the text frames those acts as performed "in conformity with the world," gestures toward human life rather than genuine requirements. Yet the Theravadin scholar Bhikkhu Telwatte Rahula, after a close study of the text, concluded that the Mahavastu's portrait of the Buddha is not dramatically different from what one finds in the Pali Canon. The more docetic and transcendent ideas associated with the Lokottaravada school are present, but they are not widely distributed through the text. That gap between the school's theoretical position and what the text actually emphasizes is itself an important finding about how doctrine and narrative interact in Buddhist literature.

• 4. The Bodhisattva Path Defined

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  The Nidānanamaskāras prologue, dateable to around the 3rd century CE, introduced a specific doctrine about the bodhisattva's career: a fourfold scheme of stages, called caryās. The first stage is the natural phase, in which a person initially plants the roots of merit in front of a Buddha with the goal of eventually attaining Buddhahood. The second is the resolution phase, in which that person makes a formal first vow to attain Buddhahood in the presence of a Buddha. The third is the continuing phase, in which practice continues until a living Buddha confirms the practitioner's future Buddhahood. The fourth stage is irreversibility, a point beyond which the bodhisattva cannot fall back. These stages provide a structured road map that transforms an aspiration into a guaranteed trajectory. The Mahavastu also contains four sections belonging to the Bahubuddhaka sutra genre, texts that narrate the lives of past Buddhas and that served as sources for Buddhist doctrines relating to the bodhisattva path. Parallel texts of this genre have been found in Gandharan Buddhist manuscript collections; one of those manuscripts dates to the 1st century BCE. A Chinese translation of a parallel text, the Fo benxing ji jing, is catalogued in the Taisho collection as number 190.

• 5. From East to West

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  The Mahavastu reached Western scholarly attention through the work of Émile Senart, who produced the first published edition of the Sanskrit text between 1882 and 1897. That edition, known as the editio princeps, presented the text in the language scholars now call Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit that blends classical Sanskrit with vernacular Prakritic elements. Senart's work made the Mahavastu accessible for study outside South and Southeast Asia for the first time. The most significant English translation came later, when J. J. Jones rendered all three volumes into English between 1949 and 1956 for the Sacred Books of the Buddhists series, published in London by Luzac and Co. Jones's translation remains a principal reference for scholars working on the text today, and specific chapters from that translation, such as chapter XXI of Volume III and chapter V of Volume I, are cited when tracing the Bahubuddhaka sutra materials embedded within the larger work.