Típó púsà zhuàn 提婆菩薩傳
Biography of the Bodhisattva Āryadeva
translated by 鳩摩羅什 (Kumārajīva, 344–413, 譯) under the Later Qín 後秦
About the work
A short single-juan biography of Āryadeva (聖天 / 提婆 Típó), the chief disciple of Nāgārjuna and the second great patriarch of Madhyamaka, translated by 鳩摩羅什 during his years in Cháng’ān (401–413). With KR6r0035 (Aśvaghoṣa) and KR6r0036 / KR6r0037 (Nāgārjuna), the Típó púsà zhuàn completes Kumārajīva’s hagiographic triplet of the great Indian Mahāyāna patriarchs whose works he was simultaneously translating into Chinese.
Abstract
The narrative gives Āryadeva’s birth in Sri Lanka or southern India (the sources differ), his early attraction to non-Buddhist religious practice (including the famous episode of his cutting out his own eye to offer to a deity, which gives him the by-name Kāṇadeva “One-Eyed Deva”), his eventual conversion to Buddhism and discipleship under Nāgārjuna, his career as polemical defender of the Madhyamaka against brahminical and other Buddhist disputants, his composition of the Catuḥśataka (《廣百論》) and other treatises, and his death (in some versions, assassinated by an outraged opponent who had lost a public debate to him).
The biography is the locus classicus for the East Asian image of Āryadeva. Like the Nāgārjuna biographies, it combines hagiographical magic with doctrinal exposition: the polemical victories are rendered as miraculous performances. The text underlies Sino-Japanese understandings of Āryadeva as the second Madhyamaka patriarch and provides the canonical biographical frame for his works in their Chinese reception.
Translations and research
- Max Walleser, “The Life of Āryadeva,” in his Life of Nāgārjuna from Tibetan and Chinese Sources (Calcutta, 1923) — early translation.
- Karen Lang, Āryadeva’s Catuḥśataka: On the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986) — biographical introduction draws on the Chinese sources.
- No standalone Western-language translation of KR6r0038 located.