JATAKA, the technical name, in Buddhist literature, for a story of one or other of the previous births of the Buddha. The word is also used for the name of a collection of 547 of such stories included in the Buddhist Pali canon. The form of most of these tales is a very common Indian one known as cikhydna. It may be a beast fable, a story of common life, or a folk tale told in prose, with the climax or essential part of the dialogue in verse. It is this verse or verses which, as being the utterance of the Bodhisatta or future Buddha, constitutes the canGaical por tion of the Jataka. The Jataka itself (the story of the past) is always preceded by a story of the present, an incident in the life of the historical Buddha, which is the occasion for his telling the story of the past, and followed by the identification, in which the chief characters are declared to be previous births of persons who appear in the story of the present. There is also a verbal commentary explaining the archaic language of the verses.
A few of the tales are almost identical with some of the beast fables of Aesop, and a larger number with the tales of the Pan chatantra. It is especially among these where evidence of adapt ation from non-Buddhist sources appears, the Bodhisatta in some of them being merely a spectator, but necessarily introduced in order to turn the story into a jataka. The last ten are long romances, and the last of all, the Vessantara-jataka, is a favourite subject of dramatic representation in Burma. The ethical teach ing is mostly that of the virtues of secular life, and moral retri bution is emphasized by the doctrines of Karma and re-birth (see KARMA).
The introduction to the Jataka-book (Nidana-kathei), which was compiled in Ceylon, but mainly from Indian sources, con tains a biography of the Buddha from the period when he first determined to attain Buddhahood down to the beginning of his preaching. There is no evidence for the view formerly held that
it was this introduction which reached Persia and formed the direct source of the story of Barlaam and Joasaph. The Budd histic features in this story more probably came from a Sanskrit source, and recent discoveries show that they passed through a Manichaean channel (see BARLAAM AND JOSAPHAT).
Jataka is mentioned in the canon as being one of the nine divisions of the word of the Buddha, but this is no evidence for the age of the Jataka-book. The prose of this is a re-translation into Pali from the Singhalese, probably in the fifth century A.D. A few of the tales, with the same verses but with very archaic prose, are found in the Vinaya, and these appear to be survivals of jatakas as they existed before their translation into Singhalese. The earliest evidence for a collection of such tales is in the carv ings illustrating a number of jatakas on the stupa of Bharhut, which are assigned to the third or second century B.c., but ad ditions to the collection probably went on much later. The Pah canon also contains the Cariyei-pitaka, a collection of 36 jatakas told shortly and baldly in verse.
There is no such great collection of jatakas in Sanskrit works, but many of the Pali jatakas as well as others are found in the Mahavastu and in Tibetan and Chinese translations from Sans krit. The Jatakamala is a collection of 34 jatakas in Sanskrit verse by Aryagura, a writer of the fourth century A.D. The Avad anas are a similar type of tale, and many of them actually are jatakas (see AVADANA).