1897.] 
L. A. Waddell— Upagupta. 
77 
presently be described, and bis name is familiar to all the monks as well 
as the laity; still the former could not point out to me any reference to 
him in their scriptures, either ancient or modern. The fact seems to be 
that Upagupta is not now an orthodox character in Burma, and his 
traditional worship or veneration is probably a survival of the Mahay ana 
form of Buddhism, which prevailed in medsevial times in both Burma 
and Ceylon. But why he should be regarded as unorthodox by the 
puritan modern Sthaviras or the so-called Southern Buddhists, is remark¬ 
able, seeing that Upagupta was himself a Sthavira and the leader of the 
Sthavira sect of primitive Buddhists, who followed the simple ethics of 
the original Vinaya code. Perhaps it may have been owing to his having 
been credited with disreputable magic powers, while he had not like his 
great wizard prototype, Maudgalyayana, (‘ Mogalli ’) the saving fortune 
of being a personal follower of the Buddha. 
In this connection it is noteworthy that Upagupta holds in most of 
the Northern chronicles, the identical position in regard to A^oka which 
the relatively vague and less trustworthy Ceylonese traditions ascribe 
to 1 2 * 4 Mogalliputta Tissa ’ (Maudgalyiputra Tisya), a name which is 
unknown to the Northern authorities. So it is perhaps worth consider¬ 
ing whether this latter name may not be merely a title of Upagupta, 
and formed possibly by fusing the names of the two chief disciples of 
the Buddha, Maudgalyi-putra, 1 and Upatisya (or fariputrn), to bring 
him, as the grpat patron monk of Ceylon, as near as possible to (^akya 
Muni himself. 
However this may be, as Upagupta seems a personage of consider¬ 
able historical importance, I propose here to string together the notices 
of his life which I have gleaned from various sources. 
Legendary versions of his life are to be found in the Tibetan 
in the 3rd and 4th chapters of Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in 
India f and in the 47th chapter of the Mongolian Hsarj-Blun. 3 Tara- 
natha, a Tibetan who never visited India and who wrote less than 
three centuries ago, makes Upagupta precede A^oka by about one 
generation, but the much more trustworthy Chinese traveller Hiuen 
Tsiang in common with the Nepalese accounts 4 state that Upagupta 
was the chief monk and adviser of A 9 oka at Pataliputra. In the 
1 He is often so-called, e.g , Beal’s Si-yu-lci, I, 39, 40, 59, 61, 108, 180, 183,187, 235 ; 
II, 6, 7, 9, 175 et seq. Also in colloquial Tibetan where his name is shortened into 
‘ Mongal-pn and Mohngal-pu’; while Qariputra is called ‘ Shari-pu.’ Conf. also 
Csoma’s Analysis of the Kah-gyur, &c., in Vol. XX. of Asiatic Researches, pp. 49, 52. 
2 Translated into German by Schiefner. 
$ Translated into German by I. Schmidt as ‘ Der Weise und der Thor.’ 
4 See preceding footnote No. 2. 
