Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism

Narrating the Bodhisatta Path

Naomi Appleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317111245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhismus

Jataka stories (stories about the previous births of the Buddha) are very popular in Theravada Buddhist countries, where they are found in both canonical texts and later compositions and collections, and are commonly used in sermons, children's books, plays, poetry, temple illustrations, rituals and festivals. Whilst at first glance many of the stories look like common fables or folktales, Buddhist tradition tells us that the stories illustrate the gradual path to perfection exemplified by the Buddha in his previous births, when he was a bodhisatta (buddha-to-be). Jataka stories have had a long and colourful history, closely intertwined with the development of doctrines about the Buddha, the path to buddhahood, and how Buddhists should behave now the Buddha is no more. This book explores the shifting role of the stories in Buddhist doctrine, practice, and creative expression, finally placing this integral Buddhist genre back in the centre of scholarly understandings of the religion.

Chapter 1
What is a Jātaka?

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was ruling in Varanasi, a festival was proclaimed in the city. The king’s gardener wanted to go and join the festivities, so he asked a troop of monkeys who lived in the garden to look after the plants while he was away. Aware of the benefits they had from living in the palace garden, the monkey-king happily agreed that they would do so. The monkeys set about watering the young trees. ‘But be careful not to waste the water!’ warned the monkey-king. So they first pulled up the plants and measured the roots, in order to ascertain how much water each plant needed. A wise man was passing and commented (in verse):

Assistance from a fool does not lead to happiness:

A fool fails, just like the monkey gardener.1

Taken as a simple story, we might learn from this that we shouldn’t associate with fools, and that we certainly shouldn’t allow monkeys to do our gardening. However, this story is not just a story, it is the forty-sixth jātaka of the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā (henceforth JA), the semi-canonical jātaka collection of the Theravāda school of Buddhism. So, we might ask, what difference does it make to the story to identify it as a jātaka? What exactly is a jātaka?

The story of the monkey gardeners is illustrated at one of the earliest Buddhist sites, the stūpa of Bhārhut in Central India. The stone relief from around the first century BCE shows a wise man observing two monkeys, one of whom is inspecting the roots of a tree whilst the other carries water pots. Similar illustrations are found in South and Southeast Asian temples, cartoons and children’s books.2 In some of these depictions a halo or golden skin indicates the special status of the wise observer, for he is identified as the Buddha in a previous life. The presence of the Buddha – or, as he is called before his awakening, the Bodhisatta – is the key criterion for identifying a story as a jātaka. Simply defined, a jātaka is a story relating an episode in a past birth of the Buddha.

Jātakas defined in this manner are found scattered throughout the texts of the early Buddhist schools as well as in commentaries and later compositions and compilations. The term is often used to refer specifically to the JA as this is the largest and most prominent collection, yet several other jātaka collections exist both within and outside the Pāli scriptures, as do more general collections of narrative, which often contain some jātakas. Jātaka texts and stories remain especially popular in Theravāda Buddhist countries, as demonstrated by their frequent illustration in temples, as well as their presence in sermons, children’s story books, plays, television programmes, theatre, dance and poetry. The stories are also used in rituals at key moments in life, and form a lively part of many Buddhist festivals. Huge roadside illustrations during the Sri Lankan celebration of Vesak, as well as long public recitations and dramatisations in Southeast Asia, are testament to the enduring popularity of the stories.

The presence of jātakas in all aspects of Theravāda life might seem somewhat curious, given the widely-held view that Theravāda Buddhists glorify buddhas and the bodhisattva path less than their Mahāyāna neighbours. Several questions present themselves about the place of jātakas in Theravāda society: if jātakas illustrate the actions of the Bodhisatta, should we view them as exemplary narratives or devotional ones? How do we explain the stories in which the Bodhisatta plays a minor or morally ambiguous part? Is it important whether or not the stories are narrated by the Buddha? What is the significance of the stories in the long biography of the Buddha? Does their illustration of the ideal path of a bodhisatta conflict with the mainstream Theravāda goal of arahatship? What role do the stories play when they are used in sermons, illustrated in temples or recited at festivals? This book is an attempt to answer such questions.

Once we consider these issues it becomes clear that formulating a definition of jātaka stories may be more complicated than it seemed at first sight, for many of the questions above can be reformulated as questions about definition: does a jātaka story have to be narrated by the Buddha? Does the Bodhisatta’s behaviour in the story affect its identification as a jātaka? Do jātaka stories illustrate the actions of the Bodhisatta or the bodhisatta path as an ideal to be pursued? Do jātaka stories have a different role in society to other forms of Buddhist narrative? Such questioning becomes circular, for in order to form a clear definition of jātaka stories one must first look at their role in Buddhist texts and societies, and yet the latter requires at least a working definition of jātakas before it can be commenced. I shall therefore begin this book with an attempt to clarify and qualify the simple definition of jātakas as stories of past births of the Buddha, by looking at the possibility of defining the form, subject matter, audience and purpose of jātakas. However, whilst we may end this chapter with a better understanding of the complexity of jātakas, the question ‘what is a jātaka?’ will pursue us throughout the chapters that follow.

JĀTAKA AND AVADĀNA

One problem with any definition of jātakas is the difficulty of disentangling jātakas from avadānas.3 The distinction perhaps most often made is that jātakas are about the past births of the Buddha whereas avadānas are about the past births of other people. However, a study of Buddhist narrative soon reveals that the situation is not so simple as this: jātakas often contain the Bodhisatta in a minor role (thus actually seeming to be about another character altogether), whilst texts that call themselves avadānas (or apadānas in Pāli) are sometimes about past lives of the Buddha. Other terms are also found: in the early portions of the Theravāda scriptures stories of rebirth appear un-named, as simple bhūtapubbam (‘formerly’) stories, and the recent Gandhāran finds include what we might call jātakas and avadānas under the title of pūrvayoga (‘former-connection’), a term also used in the Mahāvastu. To further complicate matters, the Gandhāran manuscripts also contain stories that self-identify as avadānas, but which contain no rebirth of any of the characters.4

Another common definition of avadāna, this time compatible with the Gandhāran materials, is ‘glorious deed’, or simply ‘legend’ or ‘tale’, taking the Sanskrit root as ava√dai, meaning to cleanse or purify. Under this definition the term is assumed to denote a story of the valiant efforts of a person (often one of the Buddha’s disciples), usually demonstrating its results in a present or future birth. This is not the only etymology to have been proposed for avadāna, however, and the lack of agreement between scholars reveals the complexity of the term’s origins and uses.5 Another possibility is that the term could be a back-formation from the Pāli apadāna. Whilst this Pāli term is used as the title of a collection of birth stories (of arahats, paccekabuddhas and buddhas) in the Theravāda tradition, it also has the simple meaning ‘reaping’ (related to the Sanskrit root ava√do, to cut) and is found in descriptions of rice-harvesting in the Agañña Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya. Thus Mellick has suggested that an apadāna is part of the agricultural metaphor of reaping the rewards of one’s actions.6 Since such actions could be by the Bodhisatta or another person, there is no reason why an avadāna could not also be a jātaka; indeed some stories in the Theravāda Apadāna relate the karmicly significant deeds of the Buddha in previous births, and the terms bodhisattvāvadāna (Skt) and buddhāpadāna (P) are found describing jātakas in the Northern and Southern traditions respectively.7

If we accept this definition of avadāna, is it possible to suggest – as some scholars have done – that jātakas are merely a sub-set of the avadāna genre, illustrating karmicly significant actions performed by the Bodhisatta? A quick reading of the JA reveals this to be untrue, for many of the Bodhisatta’s actions in this text are karmicly insignificant, as we will see in the next chapter. The idea that jātakas illustrate karmicly significant acts would therefore demand that we exclude much of the semi-canonical jātaka book, the very text that is considered definitional for the genre, at least within the Theravāda tradition. To go even further and suggest that jātaka and avadāna ...