Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1

Capítulo 1 - Parte 1

And among the innumerable Buddhist remains still existing there, a large number are connected with the Birth Stories.[57] It is also in this very district, and under the immediate successor of Alexander, that the original of the ‘Kalilah and Dimnah’ was said by its Arabian translators to have been written by Bidpai. It is possible that a smaller number of similar stories were also current among the Greeks; and that they not only heard the Buddhist ones, but told their own.

But so far as the Greek and the Buddhist stories can at present be compared, it seems to me that the internal evidence is in favour of the

Buddhist versions being the originals from which the Greek versions were adapted. Whether more than this can be at present said is very doubtful: when the Jātakas are all published, and the similarities between them and classical stories shall have been fully investigated, the contents of the stories may enable criticism to reach a more definite conclusion.

The case of Solomon’s judgment is somewhat different. If there were only one fable in Babrius or Phædrus identical with a Buddhist Birth

Story, we should suppose merely that the same idea had occurred to two different minds; and there would thus be no necessity to postulate any historical connexion. Now the similarity of the two judgments stands, as far as I know, in complete isolation; and the story is not so curious but that two writers may have hit upon the same idea. At the same time, it is just possible that when the Jews were in Babylon they may have told, or heard, the story.

Had we met with this story in a book unquestionably later than the

Exile, we might suppose that they heard the story there; that some one repeating it had ascribed the judgment to King Solomon, whose great wisdom was a common tradition among them; and that it had thus been included in their history of that king. But we find it in the Book of

Kings, which is usually assigned to the time of Jeremiah, who died during the Exile; and it should be remembered that the chronicle in question was based for the most part on traditions current much earlier among the Jewish people, and probably on earlier documents.

If, on the other hand, they told it there, we may expect to find some evidence of the fact in the details of the story as preserved in the

Buddhist story-books current in the North of India, and more especially in the Buddhist countries bordering on Persia. Now Dr. Dennys, in his ‘Folklore of China,’ has given us a Chinese Buddhist version of a similar judgment, which is most probably derived from a Northern

Buddhist Sanskrit original; and though this version is very late, and differs so much in its details from those of both the Pāli and Hebrew tales that it affords no basis itself for argument, it yet holds out the hope that we may discover further evidence of a decisive character.

This hope is confirmed by the occurrence of a similar tale in the

Gesta Romanorum, a mediæval work which quotes Barlaam and Josaphat, and is otherwise largely indebted in an indirect way to Buddhist sources.[58] It is true that the basis of the judgment in that story is not the love of a mother to her son, but the love of a son to his father. But that very difference is encouraging. The orthodox compilers of the ‘Gests of the Romans’[59] dared not have so twisted the sacred record. They could not therefore have taken it from our Bible. Like all their other tales, however, this one was borrowed from somewhere; and its history, when discovered, may be expected to throw some light on this inquiry.

I should perhaps point out another way in which this tale may possibly be supposed to have wandered from the Jews to the Buddhists, or from

India to the Jews. The land of Ophir was probably in India. The Hebrew names of the apes and peacocks said to have been brought thence by

Solomon’s coasting-vessels are merely corruptions of Indian names; and

Ophir must therefore have been either an Indian port (and if so, almost certainly at the mouth of the Indus, afterwards a Buddhist country), or an entrepot, further west, for Indian trade. But the very gist of the account of Solomon’s expedition by sea is its unprecedented and hazardous character; it would have been impossible even for him without the aid of Phœnician sailors; and it was not renewed by the Hebrews till after the time when the account of the judgment was recorded in the Book of Kings. Any intercourse between his servants and the people of Ophir must, from the difference of language, have been of the most meagre extent; and we may safely conclude that it was not the means of the migration of our tale. It is much more likely, if the Jews heard or told the Indian story at all, and before the time of the captivity, that the way of communication was overland. There is every reason to believe that there was a great and continual commercial intercourse between East and West from very early times by way of Palmyra and

Mesopotamia. Though the intercourse by sea was not continued after

Solomon’s time, gold of Ophir,[60] ivory, jade, and Eastern gems still found their way to the West; and it would be an interesting task for an Assyrian or Hebrew scholar to trace the evidence of this ancient overland route in other ways.

SUMMARY.

To sum up what can at present be said on the connexion between the

Indian tales, preserved to us in the Book of Buddhist Birth Stories, and their counterparts in the West:-1. In a few isolated passages of Greek and other writers, earlier than the invasion of India by Alexander the Great, there are references to a legendary Æsop, and perhaps also allusions to stories like some of the

Buddhist ones.

2. After Alexander’s time a number of tales also found in the Buddhist collection became current in Greece, and are preserved in the poetical versions of Babrius and Phædrus. They are probably of Buddhist origin.

3. From the time of Babrius to the time of the first Crusade no migration of Indian tales to Europe can be proved to have taken place.

About the latter time a translation into Arabic of a Persian work containing tales found in the Buddhist book was translated by Jews into

Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Translations of these versions afterwards appeared in all the principal languages of Europe.

4. In the eleventh or twelfth century a translation was made into Latin of the legend of Barlaam and 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.

5. Other Buddhist stories not included in either of the works mentioned in the two last paragraphs were introduced into Europe both during the

Crusades and also during the dominion of the Arabs in Spain.

6. Versions of other Buddhist stories were introduced into Eastern

Europe by the Huns under Genghis Khān.

7. The fables and stories introduced through these various channels became very popular during the Middle Ages, and were used as the subjects of numerous sermons, story-books, romances, poems, and edifying dramas. Thus extensively adopted and circulated, they had a considerable influence on the revival of literature, which, hand in hand with the revival of learning, did so much to render possible and to bring about the Great Reformation. The character of the hero of them--the Buddha, in his last or in one or other of his supposed previous births--appealed so strongly to the sympathies, and was so attractive to the minds of mediæval Christians, that he became, and has ever since remained, an object of Christian worship. And a collection of these and similar stories--wrongly, but very naturally, ascribed to a famous story-teller of the ancient Greeks--has become the common property, the household literature, of all the nations of Europe; and, under the name of Æsop’s Fables, has handed down, as a first moral lesson-book and as a continual feast for our children in the West, tales first invented to please and to instruct our far-off cousins in the distant East.

PART II.

ON THE HISTORY OF THE BIRTH STORIES IN INDIA.

In the previous part of this Introduction I have attempted to point out the resemblances between certain Western tales and the Buddhist Birth

Stories, to explain the reason of those resemblances, and to trace the history of the Birth Story literature in Europe. Much remains yet to be done to complete this interesting and instructive history; but the general results can already be stated with a considerable degree of certainty, and the literature in which further research will have to be made is accessible in print in the public libraries of Europe.

For the history in India of the Jātaka Book itself, and of the stories it contains, so little has been done, that one may say it has still to be written; and the authorities for further research are only to be found in manuscripts very rare in Europe, and written in languages for the most part but little known. Much of what follows is necessarily therefore very incomplete and provisional.

In some portions of the Brāhmanical literature, later than the Vedas, and probably older than Buddhism, there are found myths and legends of a character somewhat similar to a few of the Buddhist ones. But, so far as I know, no one of these has been traced either in Europe or in the

Buddhist Collection.

On the other hand, there is every reason to hope that in the older portions of the Buddhist Scriptures a considerable number of the tales also included in the Jātaka Book will be found in identical or similar forms; for even in the few fragments of the Piṭakas as yet studied, several Birth Stories have already been discovered.[61] These occur in isolated passages, and, except the story of King Mahā Sudassana, have not as yet become Jātakas,--that is, no character in the story is identified with the Buddha in one or other of his supposed previous births. But one book included in the Pāli Piṭakas consists entirely of real Jātaka stories, all of which are found in our Collection.

The title of this work is CARIYĀ-PIṬAKA; and it is constructed to show when, and in what births, Gotama had acquired the Ten Great

Perfections (Generosity, Goodness, Renunciation, Wisdom, Firmness,

Patience, Truth, Resolution, Kindness, and Equanimity), without which he could not have become a Buddha. In striking analogy with the modern view, that true growth in moral and intellectual power is the result of the labours, not of one only, but of many successive generations; so the qualifications necessary for the making of a Buddha, like the characters of all the lesser mortals, cannot be acquired during, and do not depend upon the actions of, one life only, but are the last result of many deeds performed through a long series of consecutive lives.[62]

To each of the first two of these Ten Perfections a whole chapter of this work is devoted, giving in verse ten examples of the previous births in which the Bodisat or future Buddha had practised Generosity and Goodness respectively. The third chapter gives only fifteen examples of the lives in which he acquired the other eight of the

Perfections. It looks very much as if the original plan of the unknown author had been to give ten Birth Stories for each of the

Ten Perfections. And, curiously enough, the Northern Buddhists have a tradition that the celebrated teacher Aṣvagosha began to write a work giving ten Births for each of the Ten Perfections, but died when he had versified only thirty-four.[63] Now there is a Sanskrit work called JĀTAKA MĀLĀ, as yet unpublished, but of which there are several

MSS. in Paris and in London, consisting of thirty-five Birth Stories in mixed prose and verse, in illustration of the Ten Perfections.[64]

It would be premature to attempt to draw any conclusions from these coincidences, but the curious reader will find in a Table below a comparative view of the titles of the Jātakas comprised in the Cariyā

Piṭaka and in the Jātaka Mālā.[65]

There is yet another work in the Pāli Piṭakas which constantly refers to the Jātaka theory. The BUDDHAVAŊSA, which is a history of all the

Buddhas, gives an account also of the life of the Bodisat in the character he filled during the lifetime of each of twenty-four of the previous Buddhas. It is on that work that a great part of the

Pāli Introduction to our Jātaka Book is based, and most of the verses in the first fifty pages of the present translation are quotations from the Buddhavaŋsa. From this source we thus have authority for twenty-four Birth Stories, corresponding to the first twenty-four of the twenty-seven previous Buddhas,[66] besides the thirty-four in illustration of the Perfections, and the other isolated ones I have mentioned.

Beyond this it is impossible yet to state what proportion of the stories in the Jātaka Book can thus be traced back to the earlier

Pāli Buddhist literature; and it would be out of place to enter here upon any lengthy discussion of the difficult question as to the date of those earlier records. The provisional conclusions as to the age of the Sutta and Vinaya reached by Dr. Oldenberg in the very able introduction prefixed to his edition of the text of the Mahā Vagga, and summarized at p. xxxviii of that work, will be sufficient for our present purposes. It may be taken as so highly probable as to be almost certain, that all those Birth Stories, which are not only found in the so-called Jātaka Book itself, but are also referred to in these other parts of the Pāli Piṭakas, are at least older than the Council of

Vesāli.[67]

The Council of Vesāli was held about a hundred years after Gotama’s death, to settle certain disputes as to points of discipline and practice which had arisen among the members of the Order. The exact date of Gotama’s death is uncertain;[68] and in the tradition regarding the length of the interval between that event and the Council, the ‘hundred years’ is of course a round number. But we can allow for all possibilities, and still keep within the bounds of certainty, if we fix the date of the Council of Vesāli at within thirty years of 350 B.C.

The members of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants were divided at that

Council--as important for the history of Buddhism as the Council of

Nice is for the history of Christianity--into two parties. One side advocated the relaxation of the rules of the Order in ten particular matters, the others adopted the stricter view. In the accounts of the matter, which we at present only possess from the successors of the stricter party (or, as they call themselves, the orthodox party), it is acknowledged that the other, the laxer side, were in the majority; and that when the older and more influential members of the Order decided in favour of the orthodox view, the others held a council of their own, called, from the numbers of those who attended it, the Great

Council.

Now the oldest Ceylon Chronicle, the Dīpavaŋsa, which contains the only account as yet published of what occurred at the Great Council, says as follows:[69]-“The monks of the Great Council turned the religion upside down;

They broke up the original Scriptures, and made a new recension;

A discourse put in one place they put in another;

They distorted the sense and the teaching of the Five

Nikāyas.

Those monks--knowing not what had been spoken at length, and what concisely,

What was the obvious, and what was the higher meaning-Attached new meaning to new words, as if spoken by the Buddha,

And destroyed much of the spirit by holding to the shadow of the letter.

In part they cast aside the Sutta and the Vinaya so deep,

And made an imitation Sutta and Vinaya, changing this to that.

The Pariwāra abstract, and the Six Books of Abhidhamma;

The Paṭisambhidā, the Niddesa, and a portion of the

Jātaka-So much they put aside, and made others in their place!”...

The animus of this description is sufficiently evident; and the

Dīpavaŋsa, which cannot have been written earlier than the fourth century after the commencement of our era, is but poor evidence of the events of seven centuries before. But it is the best we have; it is acknowledged to have been based on earlier sources, and it is at least reliable evidence that, according to Ceylon tradition, a book called the Jātaka existed at the time of the Councils of Vesāli.

As the Northern Buddhists are the successors of those who held the

Great Council, we may hope before long to have the account of it from the other side, either from the Sanskrit or from the Chinese.[70]

Meanwhile it is important to notice that the fact of a Book of Birth

Stories having existed at a very early date is confirmed, not only by such stories being found in other parts of the Pāli Piṭakas, but also by ancient monuments.

Among the most interesting and important discoveries which we owe to recent archæological researches in India must undoubtedly be reckoned those of the Buddhist carvings on the railings round the dome-shaped relic shrines of Sānchi, Amaravatī, and Bharhut. There have been there found, very boldly and clearly sculptured in deep bas-relief, figures which were at first thought to represent merely scenes in Indian life.

Even so their value as records of ancient civilization would have been of incalculable value; but they have acquired further importance since it has been proved that most of them are illustrations of the sacred Birth Stories in the Buddhist Jātaka book,--are scenes, that is, from the life of Gotama in his last or previous births. This would be incontestable in many cases from the carvings themselves, but it is rendered doubly sure by the titles of Jātakas having been found inscribed over a number of those of the bas-reliefs which have been last discovered--the carvings, namely, on the railing at Bharhut.

It is not necessary to turn aside here to examine into the details of these discoveries. It is sufficient for our present inquiry into the age of the Jātaka stories that these ancient bas-reliefs afford indisputable evidence that the Birth Stories were already, at the end of the third century B.C., considered so sacred that they were chosen as the subjects to be represented round the most sacred Buddhist buildings, and that they were already popularly known under the technical name of ‘Jātakas.’ A detailed statement of all the Jātakas hitherto discovered on these Buddhist railings, and other places, will be found in one of the Tables appended to this Introduction; and it will be noticed that several of those tales translated below in this volume had thus been chosen, more than two thousand years ago, to fill places of honour round the relic shrines of the Great Teacher.

One remarkable fact apparent from that Table will be that the Birth

Stories are sometimes called in the inscriptions over the bas-reliefs by names different from those given to them in the Jātaka Book in the

Pāli Piṭakas. This would seem, at first sight, to show that, although the very stories as we have them must have been known at the time when the bas-reliefs were carved, yet that the present collection, in which different names are clearly given at the end of each story, did not then exist. But, on the other hand, we not only find in the Jātaka Book itself very great uncertainty as to the names,--the same stories being called in different parts of the Book by different titles,[71]--but one of these very bas-reliefs has actually inscribed over it two distinct names in full![72]

The reason for this is very plain. When a fable about a lion and a jackal was told (as in No. 157) to show the advantage of a good character, and it was necessary to choose a short title for it, it was called ’The Lion Jātaka,’ or ‘The Jackal Jātaka,’ or even ’The