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Who We Are:

A-TAG (Aśvaghoṣa’s Texts and Buddhist Art from Gandhāra) is a digital humanities initiative integrating the perspectives of textual scholars and art historians. Initiated in 2021, A-TAG is the result of collaboration between scholars from CERES, Ruhr University Bochum (led by Frederik Elwert and Jessie Pons) and of “Aśvaghoṣa’s World,” an Israel Science Foundation (ISF) project at Tel Aviv University (led by Roy Tzohar, with Abigail Penn Levy and Inbar Maor); with the technical leadership of Rainer Simon, former lead developer of the Recogito annotation platform, who designed and constructed this website.

What It Does:

Plainly put, A-TAG is a newly developed online open-access tool that enables a side-by-side presentation and comparison of texts and images, in this case the Sanskrit works of Aśvaghoṣa (circa 2nd century CE) on the life of the Buddha, and Buddhist reliefs from Gandhara. The tool is based on the annotation of both the textual and visual domains with a common set of defined semantic tags. This unified tagging system creates an interconnected information network that is searchable by the same semantic terms, and which allows automatic highlighting of passages and visual elements that exhibit potential overlap. So for instance, a search for “Kaṇṭhaka,” the Bodhisattva’s horse, presents side by side all instances where the term appears in Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit Life of the Buddha (Buddhacarita) and, in parallel, visual depictions of the horse in Gandharan reliefs (and this allows for additional searches, varying in their level of specificity).

The present site is a pilot version limited to comparisons between Chapter (sarga) Five of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita and twelve Gandharan reliefs that depict episodes from the Buddha’s life that roughly correspond to the same narrative sections. These passages and reliefs illustrate events leading to the Bodhisattva’s renunciation of princely life, including his presence in the women’s quarters, his contemplation of the sleeping women, the preparations for the Great Departure, and the Great Departure itself.

In future stages of the project we aim to include the full extant corpus of works ascribed to Aśvaghoṣa, along with a broader selection of Gandharan images covering larger portions of the Buddha’s hagiography. All website images are available under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, and the texts under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

Currently, searches are by tag/term only. In future phases we also aim to introduce searches by Sanskrit lemmata, searches via pictorial identification of visual elements, as well as searches of terms derived from the available traditional translations of the works (into Chinese and Tibetan) and into modern languages (hence allowing the use of the tool for non-specialists who do not have a working knowledge of Sanskrit).

Why Aśvaghoṣa and Gandhara?

Buddhist traditional sources link Aśvaghoṣa to Kaniṣka, a patron of Buddhism and the ruler of the Kuṣāṇa empire, whose center of governance was in Gandhara. While scholarly evidence suggests that Aśvaghoṣa may have been contemporary with Kaniṣka (Lüders 1911; Lévi 1936; Falk 2001; Salomon 2015; Ollett 2019), there is no conclusive evidence connecting him either to the Kuṣāṇa court or the Gandharan region. Accordingly, this project treats Aśvaghoṣa’s relation to Gandhara as an open question, with the hope that later phases of this project will contribute to the advancement of this discussion (for more on this, see aims and vision below).

For the current, initial phase of the project, Aśvaghoṣa’s works and Gandharan art provide particularly suitable materials for comparison, both for practical and structural reasons. First, Aśvaghoṣa’s writings are the earliest extant examples of extensive Sanskrit poetry (mahākāvya) as well as early Buddhist drama. While they offer a rich source of information on Buddhist themes, they are relatively limited in number, unified in authorial voice and style, and therefore more manageable for a consistent tagging procedure.

Second, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita constitutes a rare example of a self-contained Buddha biography, recounting his life in full from conception to the division of relics, and standing in contrast to “incomplete” biographies such as the Lalitavistara, the Mahāvastu or the Nidānakathā (Lamotte 1958; Strong & Tournier 2019). In addition, the Buddhacarita’s strict narrative sequencing contrasts with the more fragmentary and interwoven storytelling techniques characteristic of other corpora, such as the Vinayas.

As scholars have noted, this comprehensive and sequential narrative arc offers a strong parallel to Gandharan art, which likewise marks an important stage in the establishment of a “reasoned” hagiography (Taddei 1999; 2003; Filigenzi 2003). So for instance, the arrangement of episodes in a chronological sequence unfolding from right to left around stūpas in Gandhara represents a mode of narration distinct from earlier Buddhist art traditions at Sanchi, Bharhut, and in the Andhra region (although not all Gandharan stūpas, it should be noted, aimed at a complete narration of the Buddha’s life, nor was a chronological order the only logic governing the scenes).

Going beyond structural similarity, the materials for this project also allows us to explore the interplay between literary and visual traditions in the elaboration of specific episodes from the life of the Buddha (while serving as a testing ground for digital tools for the exploration of this interplay). Although many Gandharan depictions of the Buddha’s life are generic and could correspond to a wide range of textual traditions, some display a striking sensitivity to particular sources (Salomon 1990; 1993; Dehejia 1997; Ducoeur 2014). In this respect, reliefs from Hadda and Karamar, depicting the conversions of Nanda, Śāriputra, and Maudgalyāyana can be plausibly connected to Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda and Śāriputraprakaraṇa (Zin 2006; Schulz 2022). Conversely, earlier scholarship has suggested that Aśvaghoṣa’s works themselves may reflect or draw upon visual culture (Johnston 1935; Olivelle 2008; Tzohar, forthcoming), highlighting the multidirectional exchange between text and image.

Our aim is not to argue for a direct influence between the Buddhacarita and Gandharan reliefs, but to show how their shared features provide a valuable heuristic tool for exploring how text and image intersect in the construction of Buddhist storytelling. At the same time, these features offer a practical foundation for developing methods of digital annotation and comparison.

Bibliography

Autiero, Serena, Elwert, Frederik, Moscatelli, Cristriano, and Pons, Jessie. 2023. “The Seven Steps: Building the DiGA Thesaurus”. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9/1.

Brancaccio, Pia. 2021. “The Narrative of the Buddha’s Life in Gandharan Art”, lecture held at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley, 21 February 2021.

Dehejia, Vidya. 1997. Discourses in Early Buddhist Art, Visual Narratives of India, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Ducœur, Guillaume, 2014. “Le bodhisattva à la salle d’écriture: Histoire rédactionnelle et datation”. _Revue de l’Histoire des religions, 231/3: 385–414.

Elwert, Tzohar, Pons et al., forthcoming. A-TAG (Asvghosa and Buddhist Art form Gandhara) Digital Tool: Exploring Narrative Traditions through the Analysis of Text-image Relations.

Faccenna, Domenico and Filigenzi, Anna. 2007. Repertorio terminologico per la schedatura delle sculture dell’arte gandharica – Sulla base dei materiali provenienti dagli scavi della Missione Archeologica Italiana dell’IsIAO nello Swat, Pakistan. Rome: IsIAO.

Falk, Harry. 2001. “The yuga of Sphujiddhvaja and the era of the Kushânas”. Silk Road and Archaeology, 7: 121–136.

Filigenzi, Anna. 2003. “Narrative Art in Gandhara”. Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia, 9/3-4: 350–380.d

Johnston, E. H. 1935–1936/rep 1984. Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita or Acts of the Buddha (in three parts: Sanskrit Text of Cantos I–XIV with English Translation of Cantos I–XXVIII, Cantos I to XIV translated from the Original Sanskrit supplemented by the Tibetan Version and Cantos XV to XXVIII from the Tibetan and Chinese Versions. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Lamotte, Etienne. 1988. History of Indian Buddhism: from the origins to the Śaka era. Translated from the French by Sara Webb-Boin. Publications de l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 36. Louvain, Paris: Peters Press.

Lévi, Sylvain. 1908. “Açvaghoṣa, le Sûtrâlaṃkâra et ses sources”. Journal Asiatique 10e Série, 12 (juillet-août): 57–184.

Lüders, Heinrich. 1911. Bruchstücke buddhistischer Dramen, Berlin.

Olivelle, Patric. 2008. Life of the Buddha by Aśvaghoṣa. New York 2008: New York University Press/JJC Foundation (The Clay Sanskrit Library).

Ollett, Andrew. 2019. “Making It Nice: Kāvya in the Second Century.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 47/2: 269–287.

Salomon, Richard. 1990. “New Evidence for a Gāndhārī Origin of the Arapacana syllabary”. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 110/2: 255–273.

Salomon, Richard. 1993. “An Additional Note on Arapacana”. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 113/2: 275–276.

Salomon, Richard. 2015. Narratives and long poetry: Aśvaghoṣa. Brill’s encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. I: Literature and Languages. Leiden: Brill (Handbook of Oriental Studies, II, 29/1), 507a–514b.

Schulz, Robert. 2022. “Aśvaghoṣa Between Gandhara and Kucha: The Śāriputraprakaraṇa and Its Narrative Expression in a Forgotten Slab from Mount Karamar”. Acta Orientalia Academia Scientiarum Hungaricae, 75/4: 515–547.

Taddei, Maurizio. 1997. “Oral narrative, visual narrative, literary narrative in Ancient Buddhist India”. In: Cadonna, Alfredo (ed.), India, Tibet, China, genesis and aspects of traditional narrative, Proceedings of a conference in Venice, Venezia e l’Oriente, Istituto Venezia e l’Oriente, Florence: Orientalia Venetiana, 71–85.

Taddei, Maurizio. 2003. “Arte Narrativa tra India e Mondo Ellenistico”. In: Verardi Giovanni and Filigenzi, Anna (ed.), On Gandhara, Collected Articles, Naples: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, vol. 2, 335–380.

Tournier, Vincent and Strong, John. 2019. “Śākyamuni: South Asia (Introduction &) Part II: Śākyamuni and the Hagiographic Process”, in: Silk Jonathan (ed.), Encyclopedia of Buddhism, volume II — Lives, Leiden: Brill, 3–38.

Zin, Monika. 2006. Mitleid und Wunderkraft. Schwierige Bekehrungen und ihre Ikonographie im indischen, Buddhismus. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Development and Methodology:

The project builds on the DiGA Thesaurus, a resource designed for the standardized description of Gandharan Buddhist art. The core of this controlled vocabulary is based on the Repertorio Terminologico per la schedatura delle sculture dell‘arte Gandharica, created by Domenico Faccenna and Anna Filigenzi (Faccenna & Filigenzi 2007). It was revised, expanded, and restructured for digital use (see Autiero et al. 2023 for a full list of the sources incorporated into the Thesaurus) and currently contains over 2,500 categories and terms. This shared thesaurus serves as the terminological “bridge” enabling direct text–image comparison.

Drawing on the terms of the Thesaurus, both the Bochum and Tel Aviv teams have manually and simultaneously tagged images and texts via Recogito, following a rigorously defined common protocol and set of criteria (see Elwert, Tzohar, Pons et al., forthcoming). Each Sanskrit lemma and each visual motif was matched with a corresponding thesaurus term. At times, new tags were created, striking a balance between the need for broadly applicable categories on the one hand and the need to capture the nuances of specific Sanskrit terms or the variety and divergence of visual motifs on the other.

In brief, elements were tagged when they had a corresponding thesaurus entry and, most importantly, only when they were potentially visible. This applies to artifacts, flora and fauna, and both human and non-human figures—including their names, epithets, and pronouns, insofar as these clearly referred to the figures. Actions were also tagged if they met the visibility criterion (though, owing to identification difficulties, expression of emotions were excluded). The spatial context of each narrative—such as localities (e.g., Kapilavastu) and settings (e.g., palace)—was likewise recorded. For the sake of orientation and reference, we have also tagged narrative episodes and segments, using their scholarly conventional titles as given by the Thesaurus (such as “The Great Departure” etc.).

This tagging hence generates two interconnected databases—Sanskrit terms and Gandharan images—forming a unified information network, which then serves for machine-generated identification of potential overlaps between text and image, and searchable by the same semantic tags.

Aims and Vision:

A-TAG is primarily intended as a tool for providing visual grounding for verbal descriptions, and vice versa, in the field of Buddhist Studies. The project’s ambitions, however, extend beyond the simple pairing of text and image. From the outset, its purpose has been to cultivate awareness of the intricate and multidirectional influences between textual and visual traditions. Its guiding premise is that narrative, text, and image should be understood as distinct members of a triad, in which visual imagery does not merely represent but also comments, performs, and instigates reaction, much like texts themselves.

Accordingly, the comparison between text and image is not confined to merely tracing lines of origin or influence, nor to establishing one-to-one correspondences. Rather, it seeks to illuminate discrepancies as well as similarities, approaching these as affordances—opportunities for retelling and reinterpretation, while also acknowledging the existence of implicit context, by which no Buddhist narrative is ever told for the first time. Building on this vision, the project treats points of similarity and discrepancies as entry points for exploring the spatial and temporal structures embedded in texts and images. It also considers what is omitted or left inexpressible, whether in words or in visual form.

Looking forward, in its next phases the project aims to establish the methodological and technical foundation required for solely machine-based tagging in both the textual and visual realms. The tagging protocol, first developed for manual tagging, is conceived as a training ground for the future integration of close reading and observation with computational distant reading, enabling the system to process vast corpora, discern patterns and regularities as well as idiosyncrasies beyond the reach of the human eye. These capacities, we hope, will allow for the identification of distinctive styles and hence contribute to a more precise understanding of the origins, development, and distribution of both these texts and images.

Sources Used in the Website:

Sanskrit Verses:

Johnston, E. H. (reprint 1984). Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita or Acts of the Buddha (in three parts: Sanskrit Text of Cantos I–XIV with English Translation of Cantos I–XXVIII, Cantos I to XIV translated from the original Sanskrit supplemented by the Tibetan Version and Cantos XV to XXVIII from the Tibetan and Chinese Versions. Delhi (Lahore 1936): Motilal Banarsidass.

E-text version: derived from the open-access annotated CONLLU file by Oliver Hellwig, from the DSC–Digital Sanskrit Corpus, provided via GitHub under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0). It was proofed and corrected by the Tel Aviv University team when required, following Johnston’s edition.

Gandharan images:

This prototype includes images from three major museum collections:

The following credits apply:

Links to the original collections are provided with each image.

How to Use: Quick Start Guide

This website allows you to search, navigate, and compare texts and images, either by starting with a verse or with an image.

You can explore the site in two main ways:

  1. Browsing through verses or images.
  2. Searching for a term using the search sidebar.

1. Browsing

Step 1. On the Home tab, select either Verses or Images from the menu.

Step 2.

If you choose Verses, you can browse by scrolling. Tagged elements—ranging from single expressions to whole narrative sections—will appear highlighted in different color codes.

Figure 1.

If you choose Images, hovering your mouse over an image highlights the tagged elements with translucent rectangular borders (see Fig. 2).

Figure 2.

Step 3.

Clicking on a tagged element in either verses or images — for example, on “Kaṇṭhaka,” the Buddha’s horse — opens a text box indicating how many times that element occurs in other verses or images (see Fig. 3). Note: not all tagged elements occur multiple times.

Figure 3.

Step 4.

In the text box, clicking on the blue highlighted text opens two sidebars presenting all related occurrences (see Fig. 4). You can move freely between them and explore, and always return to your starting point using your browser’s Back button.

Figure 4.

2. Searching

Step 1.

On the Home tab, select either Verses or Images from the menu.

Step 2.

In the search bar, type your keyword (example: Kaṇṭhaka). As you type, a list of possible terms from the built-in thesaurus will appear. Choose the desired term. Once selected, two sidebars open automatically, displaying all related occurrences of that tagged element in verses and images (see Fig. 5).

Figure 5.

Step 3.

Tips

Contacts and Feeback:

We welcome inquiries, comments, and suggestions. Please share your input through our feedback form; or you may write to us directly at asvaghosamahakavi@gmail.com. Thank you for helping us improve this project!

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