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



115 



had an alternate existence of pleasure and suffering, — an 

 idea which occurs several times in Greek mythology, notably 

 in the cases of Hercules and of the Dioscuri. 



I have made the most, I admit, of these points of like- 

 ness, but they are too numerous not to arrest attention. 

 At the time when these tales were taking shape in Buddhist 

 hands, Greek influence was powerful at the Court of 

 Magadha. As it unquestionably affected the art which 

 still remains to us, so it may well have affected the liter- 

 ature ; and the further this study is prosecuted, the more 

 clearly, I believe, it will appear that Greek culture had 

 something to do with stimulating the wonderful and sudden 

 burst of art and invention and writing, which gave shape 

 to Buddhism, and culminated in the sculptures of Bharhut 

 and Amravati. A beautiful little statue in the Calcutta 

 Museum is typical, I fancy, of much beyond itself. It is 

 a finished work of Greek art— a statue of Hercules. Among 

 many carvings and statues in which Greek influence is 

 discernible, it stands out as purely Greek ; but Buddhism 

 had laid a claim upon it, for while the lion-skin hangs 

 over one shoulder, on the other shoulder has been engraved 

 a lotus. 



The traditional account of the origin of the collection 

 being put aside (and indeed few, if any, Buddhists accept 

 it) and the range of subjects being as wide as it has been 

 shown to be, the inquiry follows— How did the collection 

 such as we find it come into existence ? The question is at 

 present of the collection of materials ; not of the language, 

 the book, or the edition. 



Growth of the Collection. — How, it is now to be asked, did 

 the Buddhist collection come together ? It may be answered, 

 in the first place, that, according to the theory of Buddha- 

 hood, in which it is an essential point that the Buddha 

 should have been developed, so to speak, to perfection 

 through a long series of lives, some record of previous 

 births of G6tama — some Jataka Book— was inevitable. 

 Accordingly, in the history of the series of Buddhas— the 

 Buddhavamsa— under the head of each of the previous 

 Buddhas who are supposed to have existed since he who 

 was to be G6tama Buddha first resolved on Buddhahood, 

 some narrative is given of the life which the Bodhisat, 

 28—85 b 



