This essay explores the image-text relationship between the ca. 12-century monumental Maitreya bodhisattva sculpture within a narrow tower in the village of Mangyu and passages from the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra.

That women cannot be bodhisattas was not a carefully considered doctrine designed to exclude women. It did, however, result in a great inequality, despite widespread recognition that women were capable of achieving arahatship. If one’s sex is no obstacle to arahatship, and this is the mainstream goal of Theravāda, does it even matter that a tradition developed declaring women unable to be bodhisattas?

We very much doubt that most Thai Buddhists would be bothered by any need to distinguish a “miraculous” category. Their traditional religion teaches that at the highest level of enlightenment all forms are illusions; thus the whole world and everything in it can be interpreted as metaphors or “names” ultimately. Nothing in such a world can, in essence, ever be real or unreal, illogical or logical in the Western Aristotelian sense.

The murals are an assertion of certain core values expressed in ancient Buddhist symbols as a defense of the totality of the religious system against perceived threats from competing modern values.

[These] murals help to make Buddhist ideas concrete

May I too accomplish the transcendent perfection
Of ethical discipline, just like you!

This prayer for accomplishing the transcendent perfections, attributed to Āryaśūra, is adapted from Dharmakirit’s commentary on the Jātakamālā. Covering the first four perfections, additional verses for the remaining perfections and birth stories were composed by the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorje.

Despite its richness as a source for one of the lost schools of Indian Buddhism (the Sarvāstivāda), and its potential contributions to our understanding of the development of narrative and ideology in early Buddhism more generally, the Avadānaśataka has never been fully translated into English.

I here present a translation of the fourth decade (stories 31-40) of the Avadānaśataka, using Speyer’s 1906-1909 edition as my base text.

While the jātakas of the second decade focus upon karmic backstories for positive events in the Buddha’s final life, in the fourth decade we find a stronger focus on the character of the Buddha-to-be as he practices the many virtues required for the attainment of Buddhahood. In that sense the stories are much closer to the jātakas of the Pāli tradition, and indeed several of the stories are also found in the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā as well as other early Buddhist narrative collections.

In the mixture with rags, strings and pegs together, well it was my image [rūpa].
So in the mixture with bone, flesh and sinews it is the individual rūpa of living beings.
If I divide the body parts apart, there is no individuality by name.
As my love was in rags, so it is in the body. Oh, blind passion!

A series of Jātaka stories and poems from Tocharian fragments.

In Jainism there is no equivalent path to the bodhisatt(v)a path; the karma that guarantees jinahood is bound a mere two births before that attainment, and the person who attracts that karma cannot do so willfully, nor is he aware of it being bound. There is therefore no Jain equivalent to the ubiquitous jātaka literature. In this paper I will explore what the absence of a jātaka genre in Jain traditions tells us about the genre’s role in Buddhism.

I begin with some general observations on the gender of the Buddha’s past lives as reported in jataka narratives, followed by a translation of the relevant section from the Ekottarikaagama. Then I compare this Ekottarika-agama version to three other versions of this tale preserved in Pali and Chinese, in particular in relation to the way they deal with the dictum that a woman cannot receive a prediction of future Buddhahood.

The weaving together of first- and third-person narration in the JA allows the Buddha to identify himself with the story whilst simultaneously stepping back from it.

The Vessantara Jātaka is not only the most popular of all the Buddhist Jātaka tales, but is important in the tradition as a whole, generally considered by the Theravādin tradition to display the epitome of the Bodhisatta’s perfection of giving (dānapāramī). While most studies have focused on philological approaches, numerous questions as to the text’s structure and how to interpret individual parts within that structure have remained unresolved My study shall employ the theory of ‘chiasmus’ (inverted parallelism) to shed new light on both the key message of the story and also the sub-themes within it.

The prince and his two wives, buddhas of the ten directions, gods and nāgas all shed tears, which collect to form a big lake. Lotus flowers bloom on the lake, and from them spring buddhas. The earth quakes, and rainbows and flowers rain down from the sky.

A couple, previously unidentified, Tibetan parallels to the Vessantara Jātaka.

Jātakas are often associated with specific locations, both within the land of Buddhism’s birth, and in other parts of Asia. There are records suggesting that such locations became early pilgrimage sites; contemporary sources also make reference to ‘local’ jātakas, which in many cases help to assimilate Buddhism into the local culture through its geography.

In this article I will argue that it is the structure of jātaka stories that allows this localisation to take place all over Asia. I contend that since the jātakas themselves are lacking in specific external referents they can easily be given a location, whilst their framing in the ‘present’ time of the Buddha’s teaching career grounds the stories in both time and place, without infringing on the flexibility of the individual stories. This ability to provide centrally legitimated relevance for each and all contributes greatly to the popularity and endurance of the jātaka genre.

Then, when King Brahmadatta had released the elephant, he said in verse:
‘You should now leave, O king of elephants!
Serve your parents and be filial (towards them)!’

Buddhism perceives animals as if they were young children who do not have the intellectual capacity to understand the world as intelligently as humans and just like children need to be protected by humans. As human are the most intelligent beings on planet earth and control almost everything, they have a responsibility toward rest of the flora and fauna.

In this article I argue that the jātakas are able to tell us interesting things about the capabilities of animals. By using stories of another key animal character—namely Devadatta, the Buddha’s nemesis—I explore what might be distinctive about the ability of animals to misbehave.

Since Devadatta appears 28 times as an animal and 46 as a human, he allows us to probe whether or not the text’s compilers saw a difference between human and animal capacities for evil. In the process, I raise questions about how we should view animal tales in the Jātakas more broadly, and highlight the productive tension between animals as unfortunate fellow travellers in the cycle of rebirth, and animals as literary devices that shed light on human behaviour.

A true hero will be prepared to sacrifice much of himself or herself for others.

This brief essay discusses two similar Jataka stories that show how the Bodhisattva sacrificed himself to relieve the suffering of others. S. Dhammika muses on the purpose of such stories.

Attitudes of the Thai embedded in the myths offer insight into the mechanism through which Buddhism was able to be integrated into the indigenous belief system.

The thing that first comes to mind is the Buddha’s immediate connection with trees, the fact that he was born under a tree, had an early spiritual experience under a Eugenia jambolala tree, became Awakened under a Ficus religiosa, and passed away between two Shorea robusta. But it would be a mistake to think that this was the most significant connection between the Buddha or Buddhism and trees.

This article briefly discusses the importance of trees outside of the usual incidents tied to the Buddha Shakyamuni’s life.

… the jackal is used to suggest that heretics, heterodox teachers, and other negatively perceived figures should be condemned not merely because of the actions they engage in or the teachings they propagate, but also because they are constitutionally inferior

… a free online searchable database of jātakas in Indian texts and art

Buddhist literature offers us the only narratives from this period that feature to any great extent the nautical or maritime traveller as hero.

Season 2, special episode i of The History of India Podcast.

We find a hidden stupa, search for the stories in the carvings, see through the invisible Buddha figures. And we see how this holy place fits into the lives of ancient Indians.

The Western adoption of Buddhism was fascinated by the intellectual side, but its enormous success in Southeast Asia and elsewhere came about by becoming so deeply embedded in the society.

An interview on a new translation of stories from the Thai collection of post-canonical Jātaka tales.

Only a couple of them are famous and some of them are just too over-the-top for words, but I was thinking when reading these, “you know, they’re not actually that different from super hero movies.”

This translation by T. W. Rhys Davids also contains his own introduction to the Jātakas, which remains worth a read even a century later.