Jataka Tales

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The Jataka tales are a vast body of Buddhist narrative recounting the former lives of the Buddha — the births, human and animal, through which the being who would become Gautama is held to have prepared himself across countless ages. The word jātaka means simply “birth story.” In each, the figure who will one day awaken appears already as the bodhisatta, the one bound for buddhahood, acting out a single virtue: patience held under injury, truthfulness kept where a lie would have been cheaper, generosity carried past all reason. A hare offers its own body to a hungry traveler by leaping into a fire; a monkey-king makes a bridge of his own back so his troop can cross; a quail too young to fly stops a forest blaze with an act of truth. The animal at the center is never merely an animal. It is the same will toward awakening, seen far back along its road, learning one thing at a time.

The Mahakapi Jataka — the monkey-king who makes a bridge of his own body — carved on the west gateway of Stupa 1 at Sanchi, first century BCE. — Anandajoti Bhikkhu, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY)

A book inside a book: the verse and the prose

The corpus sits inside the Pali Canon, gathered in the Khuddaka Nikāya — the “collection of little texts,” the miscellany of the canon that also holds the Dhammapada, the Sutta Nipāta, and the verses of the elder monks and nuns. Its history is layered, and the layers do not lie flat. What the tradition treats as canonical scripture are the verses alone — terse, often gnomic gāthā that each tale turns upon, sometimes a single stanza, sometimes a clutch of them. The prose that frames those verses, supplying the story, the cast, the setting, and the closing identification in which the awakened Buddha names who in the tale he himself had once been, is not reckoned canonical in the same sense. It is commentary — the Jātakaṭṭhavaṇṇanā, the great prose exposition compiled in Sri Lanka and brought to something near its present form around the fifth century CE, a work that presents itself as a rendering back into Pali of an older Sinhala commentarial tradition. The verses are old; the narrative scaffolding around them is younger, and the seams remain visible to anyone reading closely. In many a tale the verse is cryptic on its own — a riddle, a maxim, a snatch of dialogue — and the prose exists precisely to give it a world to mean something in.

The architecture of a single Jataka is regular enough to be a template. It opens in the present, the paccuppanna-vatthu, the “story of the present”: the Buddha, somewhere in his last life, meets an occasion — a monk grown lax, a quarrel in the order, an act of devotion — that prompts him to remark that this is not the first time. The frame then folds back into deep time for the atīta-vatthu, the “story of the past,” the birth-tale proper, where the bodhisatta lives out his episode. The canonical verse falls at the hinge of that past, the point the whole tale was built to carry. And the unit closes with the samodhāna, the “connection” or identification, in which the Buddha draws the two times together — the king of that age was Ānanda; the wise minister was Sāriputta; the bodhisatta, the one who endured, was I myself. The structure is the doctrine in miniature: the same persons, the same dispositions, ripening or rotting across lives, with the line of the bodhisatta’s becoming traced straight through the middle.

The scale of the thing

The standard collection runs to roughly five hundred and forty-seven stories, ordered not by theme or chronology but by length — by the nipāta, the number of verses a tale contains, beginning with single-stanza pieces and climbing toward the great compositions at the end. The longest cluster, the Mahānipāta or “great chapter,” gathers the final ten, the best-known of the whole corpus, each a sustained narrative and each fixed in tradition to one of the perfections. Last and longest of all is the Vessantara Jātaka, the birth-story of Prince Vessantara, who gives away his kingdom’s luck-bringing elephant, then his wealth, then his children, then his wife, in a relentless escalation of the perfection of giving. It is the bodhisatta’s penultimate life, the last before the birth in which he becomes the Buddha, and across Theravāda Southeast Asia its recitation grew into a festival in its own right — a multi-day telling, observed most intensely in the Isan country of Thailand and across the Mekong in Laos, that turns the longest of the birth-stories into a communal occasion rather than a private read.

The Vessantara Jataka on a Bharhut railing, circa second century BCE: the prince pours water over the Brahmin’s hands as he gives away the luck-bringing elephant. Now in the Indian Museum, Kolkata. — Biswarup Ganguly, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The Pali apparatus that fixed all this for modern study was assembled in the late nineteenth century. Viggo Fausbøll’s critical edition of the Pali text with its commentary appeared from Trübner in six volumes between 1877 and 1896, the philological backbone on which everything after it rests.

The folk-tale deposit

Many of the tales are plainly older than Buddhism wears them. Beast fables, trickster episodes, and folk plots that circulate across the ancient world turn up here fitted with a Buddhist frame and a Buddhist moral, the animal hero revealed at the end as the bodhisatta in an earlier skin. The same stories — or near cousins of them — surface in the Pañcatantra, in the Mahābhārata, in the Purāṇas, in the wider stock of Indian story; and a handful travel further, showing up in the Aesopic tradition of the Mediterranean. The lion outwitted by the hare, the monkey who keeps his heart out of the crocodile’s reach: such plots belong to no one tradition and to all of them. What the Jataka does is not invent this material so much as annex it — take the already-ancient stock of the storyteller and bend it to a single purpose, attaching to the clever animal or the patient king the further claim that this was the Awakened One, long before, in the middle of his making. This is part of why the Jātakas have drawn readers well outside Buddhist studies: they are one of the largest surviving sediments of South Asian narrative, a deposit through which routes of transmission — long and warmly argued over — run out into the fable literature of the wider world. The argument over which way a given story traveled, east to west or west to east or neither, is old and unfinished; what is not in doubt is that the Jataka collection is one of the great reservoirs into which that common stock drained and from which it was poured again.

What the stories are for, and where they were shown

Within the tradition the function is not entertainment but instruction in karma and the slow accumulation of the perfections — the qualities a being must ripen over many lives before awakening becomes possible. The Jātakas are the working record of that ripening: each tale a single deposit of merit, a single virtue practiced to its limit, against the long account that a buddhahood requires. They taught that no buddha arrives unprepared, that the awakening under the tree was the harvest of an immeasurable labor stretched across more births than can be counted. To rebirth itself the corpus gives its concrete face — the bodhisatta moving from skin to skin, beast to king to ascetic, the continuity not of a self carried over but of a momentum, a direction, a course set and held; the doctrine of reincarnation here is less argued than shown, animal by animal.

The east gateway and railings of the Bharhut Stupa, red sandstone, second century BCE, reassembled in the Indian Museum, Kolkata; the railing roundels and panels carry the labeled Jataka scenes. — Biswarup Ganguly, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

They were shown, too, and not only read. The birth-stories were among the very first Buddhist subjects to be cut in stone. On the railings of the stūpa at Bharhut, in the Shunga-period reliefs of the second century BCE, scene after scene from the Jātakas is carved — and, crucially, labeled, the panels named in short Brāhmī inscriptions that read like captions, so that a viewer (or a guide) could point and tell. The Vessantara and the Sibi among others can be identified by their labels alone. The same repertoire spreads across the great gateways of Sanchi and onward through the relief and painting of Buddhist India. That these stories were carved, named, and circulated in stone by the second and third centuries BCE is itself a documentary fact about their age and reach: the birth-legends were already common property, already sacred history, long before the Sinhala prose was set down. To stand before such a railing was to be walked through the path’s long preface — to be shown, episode by labeled episode, that the road to awakening is immensely long and that it is, nonetheless, walkable.

Editions, translations, and study

Western readers met the material in the nineteenth century through partial translations and retellings before the whole was carried over. T.W. Rhys Davids opened the corpus to English in Buddhist Birth Stories (Trübner, 1880), a selection prefaced by a full rendering of the Nidānakathā — the introductory narrative, prefixed to the commentary, that runs the bodhisatta’s career from a vow taken before a former buddha down to the awakening, and so supplies the frame in which all the individual births are set. Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series, 1896) folded a clutch of Jātakas into its broader anthology of Pali sources, and remains a much-read one-volume door into the literature (full text of Warren’s selections is online). The complete English collection came in stages: under the general editorship of E.B. Cowell, The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births was published by Cambridge University Press in six volumes with an index between 1895 and 1907, the individual volumes carried by a team of translators — Robert Chalmers, W.H.D. Rouse, H.T. Francis, R.A. Neil, and Cowell himself — working over the Pali that Fausbøll had fixed. It is still the only complete English Jātaka, and the standard reference, more than a century on.

The modern study of the genre has grown well past those Victorian volumes. The work of Naomi Appleton and collaborators at the University of Edinburgh has reframed the Jātaka not as a quaint repository of morals but as a literary form with its own poetics and its own theory of the past, and has built a searchable database of the birth-stories across their Pali and Sanskrit collections — text, theme, character, and place indexed together. Alongside it the art-historical scholarship on the labeled reliefs, from the early decipherments down to Vidya Dehejia’s analysis of how the stories were composed for the eye, has made the carved Jātaka a field of its own.

The tales reward a double reading. They are at once a window onto how a religion narrated its own founder backward into deep time — folding the whole arc of his becoming into a thousand small parables of beasts and kings — and one of the largest surviving deposits of the ancient world’s stories, held together by the conviction that character is something built, life upon life, long before it is finished.

→ In the library: Warren — Buddhism in Translations (1896), Jataka selections

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