"Having a Horse-Voice"; Tibetan: སློབ་དཔོན་དཔའ་བོ།, Wylie: slob dpon dpa' bo; Chinese: 馬鳴菩薩; pinyin: Mǎmíng púsà; lit.

According to the traditional biography of Aśvaghoṣa,[8][9] which was translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva, and preserved in that language, he was originally a wandering ascetic who was able to defeat all-comers in debate.

He set a challenge to the Buddhist monks that if none could meet with him in debate then they should stop beating the wood-block which signalled to the people to bring offerings to them.

However, in the north there was an elder bhikṣu named Pārśva at the time, who saw that if he could convert this ascetic, it would be a great asset to the propagation of the Dharma, so he travelled from northern India and had the wood-block sounded.

He travelled throughout northern India proclaiming the Dharma and guiding all through his wisdom and understanding, and he was held in great regard by the four-fold assembly, who knew him as The Sun of Merit and Virtue.

[11] Some recent research into his kavya poems have revealed that he may have used the Yogacarabhumi as a textual reference, particularly for the Saundarananda, which opens up the possibility he was affiliated with either the Yogacara or the Sautrantika school.

The monk I-tsing (Yijing) mentioned that in his time Buddhacarita was "...extensively read in all the five parts of India and in the countries of the South Sea (Sumātra, Jāva and the neighbouring islands).

[22][23] Another text ascribed to Aśvaghoṣa is Vajrasuchi, an extensive, beautifully written poetry that is critical of class and inequity imposed by Vedic religion.

[24] This interest among Western scholars began with Brian Houghton Hodgson – a colonial official based in Nepal who was loaned a Sanskrit text titled Vajra Suchi in 1829, by a Buddhist friend of his, whose contents turned out to be similar to the Vajrasuci Upanishad.

The details of the caste system, its antiquity and "shrewd and argumentative attack" by a Buddhist, in the words of Hodgson, gained wide interest among 19th-century scholars.

[24] The scholarship that followed, surmised that "Ashu Ghosa" is possibly the famous Buddhist scholar Aśvaghoṣa, who lived around the 2nd century CE.