Shanakavasa

Śāṇavāsa is named third in the standard Chan lineage of twenty-eight Indian patriarchs as codified in the *Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù* (Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, 1004) and reproduced in the later *Wǔdēng Huìyuán* (1252)^[1]. Within Chan he is the disciple of Ānanda and the teacher of Upagupta. The earliest narrative material attaching to him appears in the Sanskrit *Aśokāvadāna* and related *avadāna* literature, where he is associated with the Mathurā region, depicted as wearing a hempen robe (*śāṇa* = "hemp," the conventional etymology of the name), and credited with the conversion of large numbers of practitioners in northwestern India^[2].

Modern scholarship treats the Chan list of patriarchs from Śāṇavāsa onward as a doctrinal genealogy rather than a historical reconstruction. Heinrich Dumoulin notes that the precise twenty-eight-name sequence is a Chan literary construction; few of the figures between Ānanda and Bodhidharma can be reliably correlated with the historical record^[3]. What the tradition affirms through these names is the principle of *cittena cittasya saṃkrāntiḥ*—the transmission of mind by mind—rather than a documented chain of attested teachers and students.