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JĀTAKA |
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| Jātaka
means 'about birth' and is the name of a book in the Khuddaka
Nikāya, the fifth part of the Sutta Piṭaka which
is the first division of the Tipiṭaka, the sacred scriptures
of Buddhism. The Jātaka consists of 547 stories - some quite brief,
others very long - illustrating Buddhist virtues like kindness,
prudence, honesty, self-sacrifice, common sense, courage and
determination. The characters in many of the stories are animals.
The early Buddhists culled many of these stories from the great store
of Indian folklore and fables and made them Buddhist by saying that
the hero of each story was actually the Buddha in one of his
former lives as a bodhisattva. Other stories are purely
Buddhist creations.
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The
Jātaka consists of four parts. Preceding all the stories is a long
introduction (nidānakathā), which tells the traditional life
of the Buddha from his aspiration to become a Buddha up to the
founding of the first monastery. Each story is prefaced by a 'story
of the present (paccuppanna vaṇṇa), giving the
reasons why the Buddha told the story, and ends with a 'connection'
(samodhāna) in which the characters in the story are
identified. The stories themselves (atīta vatthu) are in
prose and embedded within them are verses (gāthā), of which
there are about 2500 altogether. Only these verses are considered the
actual words of the Buddha. With their lively plots, well-defined
characters and flashes of humour, the Jātaka has long been one of
the most popular books in the scriptures. Scholars believe that some
of the fables of Aesop and many other collections of folklore have
their origins in the Jātaka.