Açvaghosha's Discourse on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahâyâna

tr. by Teitaro Suzuki

[1900]

Asvaghosa's The Awakening of Faith is one of the most concise works on Mahayana Buddhism, and was translated at an early date from the Sanskrit to the Chinese. The original Sanskrit text is lost. The Awakening of Faith has been used as a textbook for Buddhist priests. This translation was the first into English; it is by Teitaro Suzuki, one of the principal writers on Buddhism of the 20th century. Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist scholar, manages to convey the difficult sense of this work, which sometimes requires inventive English neologisms. For the perplexed, there is a glossary at the end of the book.

Production notes: This text requires a unicode-compliant browser. For more information see the Unicode page. Chinese characters have been converted to image files and embedded in the text.--John Bruno Hare 12/9/2004

Introduction

The Awakening of Faith