Aryadeva
Encyclopedia
Aryadeva (3rd Century CE), was a disciple of Nagarjuna
Nagarjuna
Nāgārjuna was an important Buddhist teacher and philosopher. Along with his disciple Āryadeva, he is credited with founding the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism...
and author of several important Mahayana Madhyamaka
Madhyamaka
Madhyamaka refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of Buddhist philosophy systematized by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the āgamas...
Buddhist texts. He is also known as Kanadeva the 15th patriarch in the Zen tradition and Bodhisattva Deva in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
where he was born as the son of a king. Some Chinese sources however, suggest he was born in Southern India in a Brahmanical family. According to Geshe
Geshe
Geshe is a Tibetan Buddhist academic degree for monks...
Ngawang Dakpa of Sera Je Monastery in 2008, "Aryadeva was an Ayurvedic medicine doctor monk just like Aśvaghoṣa
Asvaghosa
' was an Indian philosopher-poet, born in Saketa in northern India to a Brahmin family. He is believed to have been the first Sanskrit dramatist, and is considered the greatest Indian poet prior to Kālidāsa. He was the most famous in a group of Buddhist court writers, whose epics rivaled the...
and Nāgārjuna
Nagarjuna
Nāgārjuna was an important Buddhist teacher and philosopher. Along with his disciple Āryadeva, he is credited with founding the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism...
."
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
Taranatha
Tāranātha was a Lama of the Jonang school of Tibetan Buddhism. He is widely considered its most remarkable scholar and exponent....
), 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.
According to the Drikung Kagyü
Drikung Kagyu
Drikung Kagyu or Drigung Kagyu is one of the eight "minor" lineages of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. "Major" here refers to those Kagyu lineages founded by the immediate disciples of Gampopa while "minor" refers to all the lineages founded by disciples of Phakmo Drupa , one of the three...
school of Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism is the body of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and certain regions of the Himalayas, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, and India . It is the state religion of Bhutan...
, Garchen Rinpoche
Garchen Rinpoche
His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in the Drikung Kagyu lineage. He is believed to be an incarnation of Siddha Gar Chodingpa, a heart-disciple of Jigten Sumgön, founder of the Drikung Kagyu lineage in the thirteenth century, C.E...
is the current incarnation of Aryadeva.
Texts Attributed to Aryadeva
- Catuhsataka-shastra-nama-karika (the Four Hundred Verses) was translated to English as Aryadeva's Catuhsaka. On the Bodhisattva's Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge by Karen Lang. Snow Lion Publications published the Four Hundred Verses as Yogic Deeds of Bodhisattvas. A new edition will be published in 2008 titled: Aryadeva's Four Hundred Stanzas on the Middle Way.
- Sata(ka)shastra (Treatise on the One Hundred Songs)
- Aksarasataka (One Hundred Syllables) is sometimes attributed to Nagarjuna
- Hastavalaprakarana (Hair in the Hand) is sometimes attributed to Dignaga and was translated to English as On Voidness. A Study on Buddhist Nihilism by Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti.