Parshva

Pārśva (Pāli: Pāssa) is the tenth patriarch in the Chan list and one of the few figures in the middle section of the lineage with a discernible historical basis. He is mentioned in Sarvāstivādin sources as one of the conveners of the Fourth Council under the Kuṣāṇa emperor Kaniṣka (1st–2nd century CE), held in Kashmir or at Jālandhara, where the *Mahāvibhāṣā*—the great Sarvāstivādin commentary on the *Jñānaprasthāna*—was composed^[1]. He is associated with the *Vibhāṣā* school of northwestern Buddhist scholasticism and is sometimes credited with the conversion of the young Aśvaghoṣa^[2].

Tradition holds that Pārśva ordained late in life—at sixty or eighty, depending on the source—and made a vow not to lay his side down on a bed until he had attained full liberation; his Sanskrit name *pārśva* ("side") is explained etiologically through this resolve^[3]. He is depicted as an elder of immense practice-power and considerable scholarship, the bridge between the early lineage and the Mahāyāna philosophical figures who follow. Dumoulin notes that Pārśva is one of three or four names in the middle stretch of the Chan twenty-eight where the tradition firmly attaches to a person known from the Sarvāstivādin record^[4].