About Viśeṣastava

The Viśeṣa-stava is a Buddhist stotra by the author Udbhaṭa-sidhi-svāmin and has pride of place as the text that opens the TIbetan bstan 'gyur. Originally written in Sanskrit, the hymns was extensively propagated and most people of the country recited these as songs. It was written to demonstrate the superiority of Buddhism over tirthikas. It is now only known from its Tibetan translation. At the time of its translation into Tibetan Prajñāvarman wrote a commentary on it which immediately follows it in the Bstan 'gyur.

An 11th-century Buddhist Pancaraksa manuscript.

Buddhist texts – The words of the Buddha

Jul

2022

Literature

Buddhist texts can be categorized in a number of ways. The Western terms "scripture" and "canonical" are applied to Buddhism in inconsistent ways by Western scholars: for example, one authority refers to "scriptures and other canonical texts", while another says that scriptures can be categorized into canonical, commentarial, and pseudo-canonical. Buddhist traditions have generally divided these texts with their own categories and divisions, such as that between buddhavacana "word of the Buddha," many of .