Jatakamala Or, A Garland Of Birth Stories

This book is a collection of stories relating to the Buddha; 30 are stories from his previous births and 14 from his life in which he attained Buddha hood. The ?Garland of Birthstories? belongs to the Canon of the Northern Buddhists. For the discovery of this work we are indebted to Brian H. Hodgson, who as early as 1828 mentioned it among the interesting specimens of Bauddha scriptures communicated to him by his old Patan monk, and also procured copies of it. The views of the Buddhists on the world and its temporary tenants, whether men, animals, or trees, are totally different from our own, though we know how even among ourselves the theories of heredity have led some philosophers to hold that we, or our ancestors, existed at one time in an animal, and why not in a vegetable or mineral state. It is difficult for us to enter fully into the Buddhist views of the world; he would only warn his readers that they must not imagine that highly educated men among the Buddhists were so silly as to accept the J?takas as ancient history. The J?taka stories are therefore at least as old as the compilation of the Buddhist Canon at the Council of Ves?li, about 377 B. C. What we possess is the P?li text of the J?taka as it has been preserved in Ceylon. The tradition is that these 550 J?taka stories, composed in P?li, were taken to Ceylon by Mahinda, about 250 B.C., that the commentary was there translated into Sinhalese, and that the commentary was retranslated into P?li by Buddhaghosa, in the fifth century A.D. It is in this commentary alone that the text of the J?takas has come down to us.