No. 28. — 1884.] first fifty jAtakas. 



101 



teaching by what he had done himself in earlier births. Of 

 the stories which he has thus told of his own previous 

 existences, 550 are supposed to have been collected imme- 

 diately after his decease. And the Commentary, in which 

 we have them now embodied, professes to state the circum- 

 stances in G-otama's life as Buddha, or in the lives of his 

 contemporaries, which led him to narrate these stories of the 

 past. Every story, then, (with exceptions which need not 

 here be noticed,) in the collection we are dealing with, 

 contains both a narrative of the past, and also a narrative of 

 the present which explains the occasion of it. Thirdly, 

 besides these two members, there is embodied in each story 

 at least one stanza or gatha, which either holds the place 

 of moral or sums up the salient points of the story. And it 

 is from the stanza, theoretically, that each story or chapter 

 of the Commentary takes its rise. The whole is an answer to 

 the question, On what occasion and in what connection did 

 the Buddha utter such and such a stanza ? Indeed, accord- 

 ing to tradition, the original Jataka Book consisted of the 

 verses only. 



The Stanza the nucleus of the story. Connection with 

 Dhammapada. — In this connection it may be worth while 

 to mention that a large number of the Jatakas are 

 especially associated with the Dhammapada — that valuable 

 collection of stanzas on topics of Buddhist doctrine and 

 morality. Many of these Dhammapada verses are the 

 central stanzas of Jatakas : in Burmah a book called 

 Dhammapada- V at th n ( { Stories on Dhammapada 5 ) has been 

 translated into English by Captain Rogers, and in China 

 Mr. Beal has collected a number of similar stories in 

 illustration of verses from the same source. All this goes 

 to show that the verses are the central element in the stories. 



Such is the shape and the traditional theory of our 

 present book. The Buddha is supposed to have uttered— 

 to have made his own if not to have invented — the witty 

 or moral stanzas under consideration : he is said to have 

 uttered them in the course of unfolding a narrative about 

 one of his own previous lives, and to have been led to 

 unfold that narrative by some event which occurred to one 

 of his monks or lay disciples, or which they brought to 

 his notice. 



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