12 Facts About Buddhist poetry

Buddhist poetry is a genre of literature that forms a part of Buddhist discourse.

Traditionally, most Buddhist sutras have a prose component supplemented by verses that reiterate and poetically summarize the themes of preceding prose passages.

Gatha functions as a mnemonic device helping the Buddhist poetry practitioner commit to memory a certain doctrinal maxim.

Sanskrit Buddhist poetry is subdivided into three types: verse works prose works and mixed works ; nowhere in the Indic tradition is versification taken as the distinguishing feature of literary diction, as all sorts of works, whether philosophical, medical, etc.

Several Buddhist poetry authors specialized in mixed verse-prose compositions, often re-telling traditional stories about the Buddha's previous births.

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Buddhist poetry poets wrote very many praises of the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and of Bodhisattvas and meditational deities.

Buddhist poetry authors wrote on prosody, offering their own poetic examples for different types of Sanskrit meter.

Two notable works on Sanskrit Buddhist poetry are the Chandoratnakara of Ratnakarasanti and the Vrttamalastuti of Jnanasrimitra, by two great contemporary Vikramasila masters who were active on several intellectual fronts and well-known exponents of Yogacara thought.

Pali Buddhist poetry follows very similar patters as Sanskrit Buddhist poetry, in terms of prosody, vocabulary, genres, and poetic conventions; indeed several Pali authors were well conversant with Sanskrit and even composed works in that language.

In medieval Japan, Buddhist poetry was accorded a special status of a separate genre within the corpus of the waka collections.

Some poets, notably Miyazawa Kenji—a devout Buddhist who expressed his convictions in his poetry and fiction—often composed poems with Buddhist overtones.

Originally written in man'yogana and attributed to Kukai, this Buddhist poetry poem contains every kana precisely once, and is learned in Japanese primary schools mainly for this reason.