No. 28.— 1884.] first fifty jatakas. 



141 



I have seen three MSS. of it. One, borrowed from 

 Maligakanda Library, bears the name in Sinhalese, Jataka 

 Pela ; but the copyist in his customary epilogue speaks of 

 the Atthavannana. This, of course, was a blunder, and the 

 copy throughout is full of every sort of mistake : but still 

 the blunder seemed, so long as we had only this MS. in 

 hand, to point to the conclusion that this copyist had made 

 up his book by extracting the gathas from a copy of the 

 Jataka Commentary. It might have seemed, had it stood 

 alone, not to be an original integral book, but a collection 

 of extracts. 



The next MS. was No. 27 in the Society's Library, sub- 

 stantially the same, but an excellently and accurately 

 written one, and this contains no allusion to the Com- 

 mentary. It has not the "uddanam" 



The third is the MS. No. 22, in Burmese characters, of 

 which Mr. Batuwantudawe" read to me enough to charac- 

 terise it. It is somewhat injured at the end, and the leaves 

 disarranged, but in other respects precisely the same as 

 the last, except in the point which I understand is most 

 important as being the sign of an original text or mul-pota 

 (which is wanting in both the other MSS.). That sign is 

 the insertion at each division— after each ten Jatakas, or 

 as the case may be— of the words Dutiyo Vaggo or (as the case 

 maybe) Tassaudddnam, &c; that is, 'here ends the second 

 division,' 'the list of its contents is as follows.' These 

 words Tassa udddnam^ and the lists repeated, are charac- 

 teristic, Mr. Batuwantudawe* tells me, of originals — Pitaka 

 books. They do not occur in the Jataka Commentary. 



There are extant, at least, two word-comments or glos- 

 saries on the stanzas only, the Getapada Sanne or 6 Glossary 

 of hard passages/ and the Jataka Gatha Sanne or Jataka 

 pela Sanne* of Rajamurari, a transcript from which our 

 President has communicated to the Society. The latter 

 work is imperfect, containing, in its extant form, less than 

 half the gathas. 



While, then, the Jataka of the Canon seems to have 

 always been the collection of the verses only, and while it is 

 only this which we can safely assume to be meant when the 

 Jatakarh as a text is referred to in the Dipawarhsa or other 

 ancient sources of evidence, some of the Jataka stories 



