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Books Āryadeva's Catuhśataka: On the Bodhisattva's Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge Similar Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Sonam Rinchen | ||
Āryadeva (3rd century CE), was a disciple of Nagarjuna and author of several important Mahayana Madhyamaka Buddhist texts. He is also known as Kanadeva, the 15th patriarch in Chan Buddhism, and as "Bodhisattva Deva" in Sri Lanka.
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Biography
Aryadeva was born as the son of a Sinhalese king and is considered the cofounder of Mahayana philosophy. According to Geshe Ngawang Dakpa of Sera Je Monastery,
Aryadeva was an Ayurvedic medicine doctor monk just like Aśvaghoṣa and Nāgārjuna".
Aryadeva was a student of Nagarjuna and contributed significantly to the Madhyamaka school. According to the Drikung Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, Garchen Rinpoche is the current incarnation of Aryadeva.
Works
Most of Aryadeva's works were not preserved in the original Sanskrit, but they mainly survived in Tibetan and Chinese translations.
His best-known text is probably the Catusataka (400 verses), in sixteen chapters of twenty-five stanzas each.
Several important works of esoteric Buddhism (most notably the Caryamelapakapradipa or "Lamp that Integrates the Practices") are attributed to Aryadeva. Contemporary research suggests that these works are datable to a significantly later period in Buddhist history (late ninth or early tenth century), but the tradition of which they are a part maintains that they are (at least in some measure) the work of the Madhyamaka Aryadeva. Traditional historians (for example, the 17th century Tibetan Tāranātha), aware of the chronological difficulties involved, account for the anachronism via a variety of theories, such as the propagation of later writings via mystical revelation. A useful summary of this tradition, its literature, and historiography may be found in Wedemeyer 2007.
Texts attributed to Aryadeva
