Text · birth-story collection
The Jātakas
Also known as Jataka, Jatakas, Jatakamala, birth stories
Five hundred and forty-seven stories of the Buddha's previous births, in the Pali canon with a later prose commentary, and the largest body of early Indian narrative to survive. Most of the stories are older folk tales with a Buddhist frame attached, which is why so many of them turn up elsewhere.
- Date
- -300–500
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
A good number have close Aesopic parallels — the ass in the lion's skin, the crane and the crab, the tortoise who talked and fell — and which way the borrowing ran has been argued since the nineteenth century without resolution. They are also carved on the railings at Bharhut and Sanchi, which dates individual stories to the second century BCE independently of any manuscript.
Connections (4)
- TransmissionMount Kōya
The Jataka stories of the Buddha's previous births are the earliest narrative art in India — carved at Bharhut and Sanchi, painted at Ajanta — and they travelled wherever Buddhism went, into Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese and Southeast Asian literature and painting. Their plots surface in Aesop, in the Arabian Nights and in medieval European exempla with the Buddhist frame stripped off, which is how Indian story material reached Europe before anyone in Europe knew what Buddhism was.
- Canonised by textPhra Lak Phra Lam
In the Lao Phra Lak Phra Lam and the Burmese and Thai traditions, Rama is a previous birth of the Buddha and the Ramayana is therefore a Jataka — which resolves at a stroke the problem of a Theravada kingdom telling a Hindu story. The Dasaratha Jataka in the Pali canon already does this in miniature, so the move is canonical rather than improvised, and it is why the epic travels so easily into Buddhist Southeast Asia.
- AnaloguePañcatantra
The Jatakas and the Panchatantra share stories, and both draw on a common stock of Indian animal fable older than either. The difference is what the frame is for: the Jataka frame makes each tale a previous life of the Buddha and a lesson in merit, and the Panchatantra frame makes it a lesson in how to survive a court. The same fox appears in both with opposite morals.
- Canonised by textSānchī
Dozens of Jataka stories are carved on the railings and gateways at Sanchi and Bharhut in the second and first centuries BCE, several with their titles inscribed beside them. That fixes individual stories to a date some centuries before the Pali commentary that collects them, and it is the only case in Indian literature where a narrative corpus can be dated from sculpture.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jataka tales”. The Jātaka, trans. E.B. Cowell and others, 6 vols (1895–1907); the Bharhut and Sanchi railing reliefs; Naomi Appleton, Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism (2010).
Open The Jātakas in the repository →