Buddhist birth stories; or, Jataka tales, Volume 1

THE OLDEST COLLECTION OF FOLK-LORE EXTANT:
BEING
THE JĀTAKATTHAVAṆṆANĀ,
For the first time Edited in the Original Pāli
By V. FAUSBÖLL,
AND TRANSLATED
By T. W. RHYS DAVIDS.
TRANSLATION. VOLUME I.
HERTFORD: PRINTED BY STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS.
TO GEHEIM-RATH PROFESSOR DOCTOR STENZLER MY FIRST GUIDE IN ORIENTAL STUDIES IN CONGRATULATION ON HIS ‘DOCTOR JUBILÄUM’ AND IN DEEP RESPECT FOR HIS PROFOUND SCHOLARSHIP THIS WORK IS DEDICATED BY HIS GRATEFUL PUPIL THE AUTHOR.
It is well known that amongst the Buddhist Scriptures there is one book in which a large number of old stories, fables, and fairy tales, lie enshrined in an edifying commentary; and have thus been preserved for the study and amusement of later times. How this came about is not at present quite certain. The belief of orthodox Buddhists on the subject is this. The Buddha, as occasion arose, was accustomed throughout his long career to explain and comment on the events happening around him, by telling of similar events that had occurred in his own previous births. The experience, not of one lifetime only, but of many lives, was always present to his mind; and it was this experience he so often used to point a moral, or adorn a tale. The stories so told are said to have been reverently learnt and repeated by his disciples; and immediately after his death 550 of them were gathered together in one collection, called the Book of the 550 Jātakas or Births; the commentary to which gives for each Jātaka, or Birth Story, an account of the event in Gotama’s life which led to his first telling that particular story. Both text and commentary were then handed down intact, and in the Pāli language in which they were composed, to the time of the Council of Patna (held in or about the year 250 B.C.); and they were carried in the following year to Ceylon by the great missionary Mahinda. There the commentary was translated into Siŋhalese, the Aryan dialect spoken in Ceylon; and was re-translated into its present form in the Pāli language in the fifth century of our era. But the text of the Jātaka stories themselves has been throughout preserved in its original Pāli form.