Lists of Patriarchs

LISTS OF PATRIARCHS.

The incorrectness of the Tibetan story, as to the conversion of Açvaghosha by Âryadeva above referred to, is further shown by a list of the Buddhist patriarchs in India appearing in various Buddhist books either translated from Sanskrit into Chinese or compiled

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in China from sundry sources. In every one of them Açvaghosha is placed after Parçva or Puṇyayaças

	THE FO TSU T‘UNG TSAI	THE FO TSU T‘UNG CHI	THE FU FA TSANG CHUAN	BHUDDABHADRA 1	SARVASTI-VADIN
1	Mahâkâçyapa	Mahâkâçyapa	Mahâkâçyapa	Ânanda	Mahâkâçyapa
2	Ânanda	Ânanda	Ânanda	Madhyântika	Ânanda
3	Çaṇavâsa	Çaṇavâsa	Çaṇavâsa	Çaṇavâsa	Madhyântika
4	Upagupta	Upagupta	Upagupta	Upagupta	Çaṇavâsa
5	Dṛtaka	Dṛtaka	Dṛtaka	Kâtyâyana	Upagupta
6	Micchaka	Micchaka	Micchaka	Vasumitra	Maitreya
7	Vasumitra	Buddhanandi	Buddhanandi	Kṛshṇa	Kâtyâyana
8	Buddhânandi	Buddhamitra	Buddhamitra	Parçva	Vasumitra
9	Buddhamitra	Parçva	Parçva	Açvaghosha	Kṛshṇa
10	Parçva	Puṇyayaças	Puṇyayaças	Ghosha	Parçva
11	Puṇyayaças	Açvaghosha	Açvaghosha		Açvaghosha
12	Açvaghosha	Kapi	Kapimala		Kumârata
13	Kapimala	Nâgârjuna	Nâgârjuna
14	Nâgârjuna	Kanadeva
15	Kanadeva   (Âryadeva)
34					Nâgârjuna
35					Deva

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and before both Nâgârjuna and Âryadeva, the most brilliant disciple of the former. The list on the opposite page, therefore, as noticed elsewhere, will furnish good material for fixing the time of Açvaghosha. It does not make any practical difference whether he was converted by Parçva himself or his immediate successor and disciple Puṇyayaças, because it is most probable they all were contemporaneous. The list generally gives twenty-three or twenty-eight patriarchs beginning with Mahâkâçyapa, but not deeming it necessary to give a complete list, I have cut it short at Deva.

Chieh-sung ¹ refutes in his Chuan fa chang tsung lun (A Treatise on the Right Transmission of the Dharma) the authority of the Transmission of the Dharmapitaka (Fu fa tsang chuan), but he agrees with it down to the seventeenth patriarch. The principal point of his refutation is simply that Bodhidharma, the founder of the Chinese Dhyâna school, should be included in the list.

Footnotes

33:1 He was a native of Kapilavastu and came to China A D. 406. A translator of many Sanskrit works. His list belongs to the Sarvâstivâdin, though it is a little different from the succeeding one. The former contains fifty-four and the latter fifty-three patriarchs. See the Ch‘u san tsang chi chi by (Nanjo's Catalogue, No. 1476).

34:1 , a priest of the Dhyâna school who died A. D. 1071 or 1072. He wrote among other works one on the fundamental identicalness of Confucianism and Buddhism.