Aśvaghoṣa
? · Ayodhyā
fl. early–mid 2nd c. CE (c. 100–160), linked by tradition to the court of Kaniṣka (r. c. 127–150 CE)
Aśvaghoṣa was a Sanskrit poet and dramatist of roughly the 1st–2nd century CE, traditionally associated with the Kushan court of Kaniṣka. He is remembered as the author of the Buddhacarita ('Acts of the Buddha'), the most celebrated poetic life of the Buddha. That work is itself a later biography—a literary retelling, not a historical record of the Buddha's life—and should be cited as a source of the legend, never as documentation of events. Aśvaghoṣa himself is a genuine historical author, though his precise dates and the details of his life are thinly attested and largely traditional.
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Ayodhyā
What they did here
Birthplace of Aśvaghoṣa.
About Ayodhyā
Ayodhyā is a city on the Sarayu River in Uttar Pradesh, India, known in antiquity as Sāketa. In the Rāmāyaṇa it is the capital of the kingdom of Kosala and the birthplace of Rāma; Hindu tradition links its founding to Manu and his son Ikṣvāku, whose royal line had the sage Vasiṣṭha as priest. It is counted among the seven most important Hindu pilgrimage sites. Early Buddhist and Jain texts say the Buddha and Mahāvīra visited the city, and later tradition records the poet Aśvaghoṣa, author of the Buddhacarita, as born at Sāketa.
Works
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