Jataka tales

“ It was when the Teacher had thus concluded his discourse that he, as Buddha, uttered the verse—
“’Tis those who reverence the old
That are the men versed in the Faith.
Worthy of praise while in this life,
And happy in the life to come.”
When the Teacher had thus spoken on the virtue of paying reverence to the old, he established the connexion, and summed up the Jātaka, by saying, “The elephant of that time was Moggallāna, the monkey Sāriputta, but the partridge was I myself.” ”

“ Then they thought the matter over, and came to the conclusion that the Camel should keep his hump and the Pig his snout, observing,—
"Tall is good, where tall would do;
Of short, again, 'tis also true!"
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Many scholars have believed that all fables originated in India. The great Indian collection of symbolic stories known as Jataka Tales, or Buddhist Birth Stories, has been called "the oldest, most complete, and most important collection of folklore extant." ”

“ How can it stand against the rival claims of the fairy tales of science, and the entrancing, manylxxxviisided story of man’s gradual rise and progress? But though these less fabulous and more attractive stories shall increasingly engage the attention of ourselves and of our children, we may still turn with appreciation to the ancient Book of the Buddhist Jātaka Tales as a priceless record of the childhood of our race. ”

“ The Blessed One, sending this retinue of lay disciples in front, and attended by the great multitude of monks, entered the Jetavana monastery with the infinite grace and unequalled majesty of a Buddha, making the spaces of the grove bright with the halo from his person, as if they were sprinkled with gold-dust. ”

“ Sivaïte literature paved the way for the Manik Maya, the Bandoong, the Aji Saka, the Panji- and the Menak- or Hamza-cycles, the [123] Damar Wulan; as to Buddhist literature, Burnouf’s comment upon its inferiority holds also good for Java: no trace exists even of a life of the Buddha, of jataka-tales, except such as have originated in the eastern kingdoms at a comparatively late date. Literary culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a continuation of and throve on the efforts of the great authors hospitably entertained at the Courts of Mojopahit and Kediri. ”

“ Seeing that wonder, the multitude praised the Master, saying, “Ah! how great is the power of the Buddhas! Even so mighty an infidel as this has thought him worthy! Even Uruvela Kassapa has broken through the net of delusion, and has yielded to the successor of the Buddhas!”
But the Blessed One said, “Not now only have I overcome Uruvela Kassapa; in former ages, too, he was conquered by me.” And he uttered in that connexion the Mahā Nārada Kassapa Jātaka, and proclaimed the Four Truths. ”

“ And returning to Benāres, he practised charity, and did other good deeds, and so when his life was ended he passed away to heaven.
And Mallika the king took his exhortation to heart; and having in vain searched the country through for a fault-finder, he too returned to his own city, and practised charity and other good deeds; and so at the end of his life he went to heaven.
The mixture in this Jātaka of earnestness with dry humour is very instructive. The exaggeration in the earlier part of the story; the hint that law depends in reality on false cases ”

“ The only thing which continues to exist when a man dies is his Karma, the result of his words and thoughts and deeds (literally his ‘doing’) ; and the curious theory that this result is concentrated in some new individual is due to the older theory of soul.
In the case of one Jātaka (Fausböll, No. 276) , the Conclusion is wholly in verse; and in several cases the Conclusion contains a verse or verses added by way of moral. Such verses, when they occur, are called Abhisambuddha-gāthā, or Verses spoken by the Buddha, not when he was still only a Bodisat, but when he had become a Buddha. ”

“ An abstract of the first part of this Jātaka will set forth the striking resemblance between our stories and this old Hindoo apologue,1 The part of the Jātaka that interests us is briefly the account of how a man was haled to the king’s tribunal for injuries done unwittingly, and how the king passed judgment thereupon. The abstract follows:—
Gāmaṇi, a certain old courtier of the ruling king’s dead father, decided to earn his living by farming, as he thought that the new king should be surrounded with advisers of his own age. ”

“ There are several reasons for supposing that these verses are older than the prose which now forms their setting. The Ceylon tradition goes so far as to say that the original Jātaka Book, now no longer extant, consisted of the verses alone; that the Birth Stories are Commentary upon them ”

“ See below, Jātaka No. 3.
183 Literally “worth eighty and seven times a koṭi,” both eighty and seven being lucky numbers.
184 Literally, “and caused him to declare, ‘The way of salvation for Nālaka.’” Perhaps some Sutta is so called. Tathagata, “gone, or come, in like manner; subject to the fate of all men,” is an adjective applied originally to all mortals, but afterwards used as a favourite epithet of Gotama. Childers compares the use of ‘Son of Man.’ ”

“ General Cunningham himself gives the story called Isī-singga Jātaka (No. 7 in the above list) , in which the ascetic after whom the Jātaka is named is not the Bodisat.
110 Not as yet found in the Jātaka Book; but Dr. Bühler has shown in the ‘Indian Antiquary,’ vol. i. p. 305, that it is the first tale in the ‘Vrihat Kathā’ or Kshemendra (Table I. No. 34) , and in the ‘Kathā Sarit Sāgara’ of Somadeva (Table I. No. 33) , and was therefore probably included in the ‘Vrihat Kathā’ of Guṇadhya (Table I. No. 32) . ”

“ But the young girl said to the nuns, “Ladies! the Elder, Devadatta, is not the Buddha. Not under him did I enter the religious life, but under the Buddha himself, who is supreme among men. What I obtained with such difficulty, O, deprive me not of that! Take me, I pray you, and go to the Master himself at Jetavana!”
And they took her; and passing over the forty-five leagues of road which stretched from Rājagaha to that203 place, they arrived in due course at Jetavana, and saluting the Master, told him the whole matter. ”

“ There is, however, at least an indication that the second part of the story, the expedition to Lankā, was also known to the author of the Jātaka; for while Vālmīki’s poem concludes with the reunion of Rāma and Sītā, the [307] Jātaka is made to end with the marriage of the couple after the manner of fairy tales, there being at the same time traces that they were wedded all along in the original source of the legend. Moreover, a verse from the old part of the Rāmāyaṇa (vi. 128) actually occurs in a Pāli form embedded in the prose of this Jātaka. ”

“ And Puṇṇā coming there saw the Bodisat sitting at the foot of the tree and lighting up all the region of the East; and she saw the whole tree in colour like gold from the rays issuing from his body. And she thought, “To-day our god, descending from the tree, is seated to receive our offering in his own hand.” And excited with joy, she returned quickly, and announced this to Sujātā. Sujātā, delighted at the news, gave her all the ornaments befitting a daughter, saying, “To-day, from this time forth, be thou to me in the place of an elder daughter!” ”

“ The Ass in the Jataka is dressed every morning by his master in the Lion's skin, so as to obtain free pasturage by frightening away the villagers. (Given in Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales, number 20.) The story is told of a Hare in South Africa (Bleek, Reineke Fuchs in Africa) , Thackeray includes it as before in his Newcomes. ”

“ I should also mention here that another well-known work, the Vetāla-Pañca-Viṅsatī (the Twenty-five Tales of a Demon) , is contained in both the Sanskrit poems, and was therefore probably also in Guṇādhya’s collection; but as no Jātaka stories have been as yet traced in it, I have simply included it for purposes oflxxiv reference in Table I., together with the most important of those of the later Indian story-books of which anything certain is at present known. ”

“ The next tale to be quoted is one showing how a wise man solves a difficulty. I am sorry that Mr. Fausböll has not yet reached this Jātaka in his edition of the Pāli text; but I give it from a Siŋhalese version of the fourteenth century, which is nearer to the Pāli than any other as yet known.18 It is an episode in
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The Birth as ‘Great Physician.’19
MAHOSADHA JĀTAKA.
A woman, carrying her child, went to the future Buddha’s tank to wash. And having first bathed the child, she put on her upper garment and descended into the water to bathe herself. ”

“ In the Jataka stories, or Birth tales, "the Buddha elect" is the title given to each of the beings, man, angel, or animal, who is held to be a Bodhisattva, or the future Buddha in one of his former births. The title Bodhisattva19 is the name given to a being whose Karma will produce other beings in a continually ascending scale of goodness until it becomes vested in a Buddha. Or, in the more common use of {170} the word, a Bodhisattva (Japanese bosatsu) is a being whose essence has become intelligence, and who will have to pass through human existence once more only before entering Nirvana. ”

“ The Supreme Buddha performed on that occasion the Double Miracle, remained some time in heaven, and on the Great Day of the Pavāraṇā Festival315 descended at the city of Saŋkassa, and entered Jetavana with a great retinue.
When the monks were seated in the Lecture Hall, they began to extol the virtue of the Teacher, saying, “Truly, Brethren! unequalled is the power of the Tathāgata. The yoke the Tathāgata bears none else is able to bear. Though the Six Teachers kept on saying, ‘We will work wonders! We will work wonders!’ they could not do even one. ”

“ This will be explained in the Kuṇāla Jātaka. At that time, namely, the Master admonishing his relations, said, “My lords! for relatives to quarrel one against another is verily most unbecoming! Even animals once, who had conquered their enemies so long as they agreed, came to great destruction when they fell out with one another.” And at the request of his relatives he told the tale.
Long ago, when Brahma-datta was reigning in Benares, the Bodisat came to life as a quail; and lived in a forest at the head of a flock many thousands in number. ”

“ Dispelling darkness in the world, held aloft the torch of truth.
And after the Buddha had died, shrouding in darkness ten thousand worlds, the Teacher named Sumana appeared. He also had three great assemblies of saints, at the first assembly the priests were a million millions, at the second, on the Golden Mountain, ninety million of millions, at the third eighty million of millions. At this time the Bodhisatta was the Nāga king Atula, mighty and powerful. ”

“ As soon as the Buddha came in, the assembly of the mendicants stopped their talking and were silent. The Teacher looked mildly and kindly round him, and thought, “This assembly is most seemly; not a hand nor foot stirs, no sound of coughing or sneezing can be heard! If I were to sit here my life long without speaking, not one of all these men—awed by the majesty and blinded by the glory of a Buddha—would venture to speak first. ”

“ The foolish merchant did as the demon bade him and emptied every jar, saving not even a cupful. On and on they traveled and the streak on the sky faded with the sunset. There was no forest, the dark line being only clouds. No water was to be found. The men had no water to drink and no food to eat, for they had no water in which to cook their rice, so they went thirsty and supperless to bed. The oxen, too, were hungry and thirsty and dropped down to sleep here and there. Late at night the demons fell upon them [49] and easily carried off every man. ”

“ The five mendicants, seeing already from afar the Buddha coming, said one to another, “Friend, here comes the mendicant Gotama. He has turned back to a free use of the necessaries of life, and has recovered roundness of form, acuteness of sense, and beauty of complexion. We ought to pay him no reverence; but as he is, after all, of a good family, he deserves the honour of a seat. ”

“ I do not understand the allusion to a one-seeded Palmyra.
201 Nāgas, Yakkhas and Supaṇṇas. The Yakkhas are characterized throughout the Jātaka stories by their cannibalism; the female Yakkhas as sirens luring men on to destruction. They are invisible till they assume human shape; but even then can be recognized by their red eyes. That the Ceylon aborigines are called Yakkhas in the Mahāvaŋsa probably results from a tradition of their cannibalism. ”

“ In the eleventh or twelfth century a translation was made into Latin of the legend of Barlaam andxlix Josaphat, a Greek romance written in the eighth century by St. John of Damascus on the basis of the Buddhist Jātaka book. Translations, poems, and plays founded on this work were rapidly produced throughout Western Europe. ”

“ The Black One, the king of the Nāgas, dived into the earth, and went to Mañjerika, the palace of the Nāgas, five hundred leagues in length, and lay down, covering his face with his hands. Sakka, taking the Vijayuttara trumpet on his back, stopped on the rocky verge of the world. Mahā Brahma, putting the white canopy of state on to the summit of the rocks at the end of the earth, went to the world of Brahma. Not a single deity was able to keep his place. The Great Being sat there alone.
But Māra said to his host, “Friends! there is no other man like Siddhattha, the son of Suddhodana. ”

“ On seeing this, the mendicants asked the Blessed One, “Lord! is there now any advantage in this?” And he told a tale.
Once upon a time, in the land of Kāsi, a landed proprietor in a certain village promised an offering to the Genius of a Banyan-tree standing by the gate of the village. And when he had returned safely, he slew a number of animals; and saying to himself, “I will make myself free from my vow,” he went to the foot of the tree.
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But the tree-god, standing in a fork of the tree, uttered this stanza:
Would you be free, you first must die! ”