Aśvaghoṣa
A figure from the books
#Ashvaghosha
Aśvaghoṣa · c. 80–150 CE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Poetry, drama, Buddhist monasticism — author of the earliest surviving Sanskrit court epics and the oldest surviving fragments of Indian theatre.
“A brahmin who set out to crush the Buddhists in debate lost, joined them, and kept his old weapons — and the poems he then wrote fixed the shape of the Buddha's life story for all of Asia, surviving, when India let the Sanskrit drop, in Chinese and Tibetan on the far side of the mountains.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“Beauty can be a delivery mechanism. Take everything courtly poetry does best — palaces, love, battle, longing — and use it to make the Buddha's austere teaching go down like honey: his own image for it, "bitter medicine mixed with honey."”
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