Jataka
Encyclopedia
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
concerning the previous births (jāti) of the Buddha.
In Theravada
Theravada
Theravada ; literally, "the Teaching of the Elders" or "the Ancient Teaching", is the oldest surviving Buddhist school. It was founded in India...
Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
, the Jatakas are a textual division of the Pali Canon
Pāli Canon
The Pāli Canon is the standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, as preserved in the Pāli language. It is the only completely surviving early Buddhist canon, and one of the first to be written down...
, included in the Khuddaka Nikaya
Khuddaka Nikaya
The Khuddaka Nikaya is the last of the five nikayas, or collections, in the Sutta Pitaka, which is one of the "three baskets" that compose the Pali Tipitaka, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism...
of the Sutta Pitaka
Sutta Pitaka
The Sutta Pitaka is the second of the three divisions of the Tipitaka or Pali Canon, the Pali collection of Buddhist writings, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism...
. The term Jataka may also refer to a traditional commentary on this book.
History
The Jatakas were originally amongst the earliest Buddhist literature, with metrical analysis methods dating their average contents to around the 4th century BCE. The MahāsāṃghikaMahasamghika
The ' , literally the "Great Saṃgha", was one of the early Buddhist schools in ancient India.The origins of the sect of Buddhism are still extremely uncertain, and the subject of debate among scholars. One reason for the interest in the origins of the school is that their Vinaya recension appears...
Caitika
Caitika
The Caitika was an early Buddhist school, and was a sub-sect of the Mahāsāṃghika school. They were also known as the Caityaka sect. The Caitikas proliferated throughout the mountains of southern India, from which it derives its name....
sects from the Āndhra region took the Jatakas as canonical literature, and are known to have rejected some of the Theravada Jatakas which dated past the time of King Ashoka
Ashoka
Ashok Maurya or Ashoka , popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was an Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from ca. 269 BC to 232 BC. One of India's greatest emperors, Ashoka reigned over most of present-day India after a number of military conquests...
. The Caitikas claimed that their own Jatakas represented the original collection before the Buddhist tradition split into various lineages.
According to A.K. Warder, the Jatakas are the precursors to the various legendary biographies of the Buddha, which were composed at later dates. Although many Jatakas were written from an early period, which describe previous lives of the Buddha, very little biographical material about Gautama's own life has been recorded.
Contents
The Theravada Jatakas comprise 547 poems, arranged roughly by increasing number of verses. According to Professor von Hinüber, only the last 50 were intended to be intelligible by themselves, without commentary. The commentary gives stories in prose that it claims provide the context for the verses, and it is these stories that are of interest to folklorists. Alternative versions of some of the stories can be found in another book of the Pali Canon, the CariyapitakaCariyapitaka
The Cariyapitaka is a Buddhist scripture, part of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism. It is included there in the Sutta Pitaka's Khuddaka Nikaya, usually as the last of fifteen books...
, and a number of individual stories can be found scattered around other books of the Canon. Many of the stories and motifs found in the Jataka such as the Rabbit in the Moon of the Śaśajâtaka (Jataka Tales: no.316), are found in numerous other languages and media. For example, The Monkey and the Crocodile, The Turtle Who Couldn't Stop Talking and The Crab and the Crane that are listed below also famously feature in the Hindu Panchatantra
Panchatantra
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian inter-related collection of animal fables in verse and prose, in a frame story format. The original Sanskrit work, which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sharma...
, the Sanskrit niti-shastra that ubiquitously influenced world literature. Many of the stories and motifs being translations from the Pali but others are instead derived from vernacular oral traditions prior to the Pali compositions.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
(see for example the Jatakamala) and Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
an Jataka stories tend to maintain the Buddhist morality of their Pali equivalents, but re-tellings of the stories in Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
and other languages sometimes contain significant amendments to suit their respective cultures.
Apocrypha
Within the Pali tradition, there are also many apocryphal Jatakas of later composition (some dated even to the 19th century) but these are treated as a separate category of literature from the "Official" Jataka stories that have been more-or-less formally canonized from at least the 5th century — as attested to in ample epigraphic and archaeological evidence, such as extant illustrations in bas relief from ancient temple walls. Some of the apocryphal Jatakas (in Pali) show direct appropriations from Hindu sources, with amendments to the plots to better reflect Buddhist morals.Buddhism
In TheravadaTheravada
Theravada ; literally, "the Teaching of the Elders" or "the Ancient Teaching", is the oldest surviving Buddhist school. It was founded in India...
countries, several of the longer Jatakas are still performed in dance, theatre, and formal (quasi-ritual) recitation to this day, and several are associated with particular holidays on the lunar calendar
Lunar calendar
A lunar calendar is a calendar that is based on cycles of the lunar phase. A common purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar or Hijri calendar. A feature of the Islamic calendar is that a year is always 12 months, so the months are not linked with the seasons and drift each solar year by 11 to...
used by Cambodia
Cambodia
Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...
, Thailand
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
and Laos
Laos
Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...
.
Translations
The standard Pali collection of jatakas, with canonicalCanonical
Canonical is an adjective derived from canon. Canon comes from the greek word κανών kanon, "rule" or "measuring stick" , and is used in various meanings....
text embedded, has been translated by E. B. Cowell
Edward Byles Cowell
Professor Edward Byles Cowell FBA was a noted translator of Persian poetry and the first professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge University....
and others, originally published in six volumes by Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, 1895-1907; reprinted in three volumes, Pali Text Society
Pali Text Society
The Pali Text Society was founded in 1881 by T.W. Rhys Davids "to foster and promote the study of Pali texts".Pali is the language in which the texts of the Theravada school of Buddhism is preserved...
, Bristol. There are also numerous translations of selections and individual stories from various languages. Google Books (edited and induced from The Morall Philosophie of Doni by Sir Thomas North, 1570)
Stories
- Grannie's Blackie
- How the Turtle Saved His Own Life
- The Banyan Deer
- The Crab and the Crane
- The Elephant Girly-Face
- The Foolish, Timid Rabbit
- The Great Ape
- The King's White Elephant
- The Measure of Rice
- The Merchant of Seri
- The Monkey and the Crocodile
- The Ox Who Envied the Pig
- The Ox Who Won the Forfeit
- The Princes and the Water-Sprite
- The Quarrel of the Quails
- The Sandy Road
- The Turtle Who Couldn't Stop Talking
- The Wise and the Foolish Merchant
- Why the Owl Is Not King of the Birds
- See also: :Category:Jataka
See also
- Kacchapa Jataka, or The Talkative Tortoise
- PanchatantraPanchatantraThe Panchatantra is an ancient Indian inter-related collection of animal fables in verse and prose, in a frame story format. The original Sanskrit work, which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sharma...
- Prince SattvaPrince SattvaPrince Sattva was one of the previous incarnations of Gautama Buddha, according to a jataka story. The son of King Maharatha, he became an aescetic and gained a few disciples. On his walk with his closest disciple, he comes to the edge of a cliff, at the bottom of which is a starving tigress...
- The Tiger, the Brahmin and the JackalThe Tiger, the Brahmin and the JackalThe Tiger, the Brahmin and the Jackal is a popular Indian fairy tale with a long history and many variants. A version was included in Joseph Jacobs' collection Indian Fairy Tales.-Synopsis:...
- Vessantara JatakaVessantara JatakaThe Vessantara Jataka is one of the most popular avadānas of Theravada Buddhism. The Vessantara Jataka tells the story of one of Buddha's past lives, about a compassionate prince, Vessantara, who gives away everything he owns, including his children, thereby displaying the virtue of perfect charity...
Further reading
Concordance of Buddhist Birth Stories, Pali Text Society, Lancaster, tabulates correspondences between various jataka collections.- The Jatakas — Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta, amazon.com, Sandra Shaw, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2006
- Twenty Jataka Tales, amazon.com, Noor Inayat Khan, Inner Traditions, 1985
External links
- Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt on holyeBooks.org
- Jataka Tales re-told by Ellen C. Babbitt with illustrations by Ellsworth Young
- Jataka - Volumes I and II of E. B. Cowell 1895 3 volume (6 book) edition.
- Jataka - Volumes I, II and III of E. B. Cowell 1895 3 volume (6 book) edition.
- Jataka - Volume 6 of E. B. Cowell 1895 3 volume (6 book) edition.
- Jataka Tales - by Ellen C. Babbitt 1912
- Buddhist Birth Stories (JatakaJatakaThe Jātakas refer to a voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of the Buddha....
Tales), T. W. Rhys Davids, London 1880, archive.org - Jataka Tales - English Animation
- Jataka Stories - Small selection
- "The Illustrated Jataka & Other Stories of the Buddha" by Dr C. B. Varma - Illustrated, English
- Jataka: from Pali Proper Names
- Buddhist tales