An analysis of the text of Advadānaśataka shows the ‘Avadāna’ as a genre of Buddhist literature as having the following characteristics: (1) The hero or heroine is one of the Buddha’s disciples or one of the most pious devotees of the Buddha, and not the Bodhisattva as in Jātakas. (2) In narrating past events, one of the Seven Past Buddhas, esp. Vipaśyin or Kāśyapa, appears every time. (3) In the ‘connexion’, the hero of the story of the past is identified by the Buddha with that of the story of the present, but not with the Buddha himself as in Jātakas. In the Chinese version of the Avadānaśataka, the heroes of all narratives are contemporary of the Buddha, while in the hundredth of the Sanskrit text the hero is a contemporary of King Aśoka and there the expositor of the story of the past is Upaqupta, the Sthavira. As the general scheme of the metrical paraphrases of the Avadānaśataka, the Kalpadrumāvadānamālā and the Ratnāvadānamālā, is a dialogue between Aśoka and Upaqupta in which all the stories in the original are related, the hundredth story of the Avadānaśataka must have been rewritten before these metrical paraphrases were compiled. According to the Buddhist legend, Upaqupta was a Sthavira of the Sarvāstivādin sect in Mathurā. This leads us to a conclusion that the present Sanskrit text of the Avadānaśataka belongs to the Sarvāstivādin sect. As for the Chinese version, we are unable at present to decide whether or not it belongs to that sect.
