Punyayashas

Puṇyayaśas, eleventh patriarch in the Chan list, is named in the *Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù* as the disciple of Pārśva and teacher of Aśvaghoṣa^[1]. The Chan account preserves the encounter narrative between Puṇyayaśas and Aśvaghoṣa as one of the more developed dialogues in the early section of the transmission-of-the-lamp literature: Aśvaghoṣa, then a brahmin debater hostile to Buddhism, was won over not through doctrinal argument but through Puṇyayaśas's direct response to a challenge about the meaning of the term "Buddha"^[2].

Dumoulin notes that the placement of Puṇyayaśas in the lineage—immediately preceding the historically attested Aśvaghoṣa—reflects the Chan compilers' care to lodge each significant Mahāyāna figure within a recognizable teacher-student relationship within the Indian sequence^[3].