The Awakening of Faith is one of the most influential Chinese Buddhist texts. Conventionally, Chinese Buddhist scholars follow Lü Cheng's argument that The Awakening of Faith is a Chinese Buddhist fabrication, rather than an authentic Indian writing by the great saint, Aśvaghosa. Recognizing that The Awakening of Faith is doctrinally related to Bodhiruci's translation of The Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, Lü asserts that Bodhiruci's translation is inaccurate because it looms the two doctrines of ālayavijnāna and tathāgatagarbha together. Since The Awakening of Faith also looms up these two doctrines together, Lü argues that Aśvaghosa, the great saint, cannot be the author of The Awakening. The present paper, by again checking Bodhiruci's translation against the Sanskrit text and other Chinese translations of it, demonstrates that Bodhiruci's translation is careful to show that the two doctrines are essentially distinct in many places, although sometimes rhetorically identical in Bodhiruci's translation. Lü missed the doctrinal subtlety of The Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra. Thus, Lü's view that The Awakening of Faith is a Chinese fabrication needs to be reconsidered.
