Once the Buddha Was a Monkey

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Once the Buddha Was a Monkey: Ārya Śūra's Jātakamālā

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

Here is one of the most entertaining masterpieces of Sanskrit literature rendered in an English translation that fully captures the original’s artistry and charm.

Written most probably in the fourth century A.D., the Jatakamala is generally considered the masterpiece of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit. In elegant, courtly style, Arya Sura retells thirty-four traditional stories about the Buddha in his previous incarnations, human and animal. Whether as a king, a brahmin, a monkey, or a hare, the Great One is shown in assiduous pursuit of virtue and compassion. Though primarily intended as exemplary tales illustrating the Buddhist virtues, these stories also provide a vivid picture of life at a high point in ancient Indian culture—city life in ordinary households or at the royal court, and country life against a backdrop of mountain, desert, and jungle.

Fresh study of the Sanskrit manuscripts, now scattered in libraries all over the world, has enabled Peter Khoroche to make this new translation faithful to the original in both style and content. His explanatory notes will assist student and general reader alike in appreciating this classic from an ancient and exotic civilization. (Source: The University of Chicago Press)

Citation

Ārya Śūra. Once the Buddha Was a Monkey: Ārya Śūra's Jātakamālā. Translated by Peter Khoroche. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Publisher Link

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3618407.html

Table of contents

Forewordvii
Prefaceix
Introductionxi
Prologue3
1. The Tigress5
2. Śibi10
3. The Dumpling18
4. The Merchant22
5. Aviṣahya the Merchant26
6. The Hare32
7. Agastya39
8. Maitrībala47
9. Viśvaṃtara58
10. The Sacrifice74
11. Śakra81
12. The Brahmin84
13. Unmādayantī88
14. Supāraga96
15. The Lord of the Fish103
16. The Young Quail107
17. The Jar Full of Spirits110
18. The Man without an Heir115
19. The Lotus Stalks119
20. The Royal Treasurer126
21. Bodhi133
22. The King of the Geese140
23. Bodhi the Wandering Ascetic153
24. The Great Ape166
25. The Ibex173
26. The Antelope178
27. The King of the Monkeys186
28. Kṣāntivādin193
29. The Inhabitant of Highest Heaven205
30. The Elephant213
31. Sutasoma221
32. Ayogṛha, the Prince in the Iron House237
33. The Buffalo245
34. The Woodpecker249
Abbreviations255
Notes255
Bibliography271

Interconnections

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1 Full translation of

Āryaśūra. jātakamāla [जातकमाला]. skyes pa'i rabs kyi rgyud [སྐྱེས་པའི་རབས་ཀྱི་རྒྱུད།]. [The Garland of Previous Lives (84000)]. Translated by Mañjuśrīvarman, Vidyākarasiṃha. Tengyur, RKTST 3488 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3488&typ=2.

Classical WorksAbout this item

Jātakamālā. (T. Skyes pa'i rabs kyi rgyud; C. Pusa benshengman lun; J. Bosatsu honjōmanron; K. Posal ponsaengman non 菩薩本生鬘論). In Sanskrit, "Garland of Birth Stories," by the poet Śūra [alt. Āryaśūra; c. second-century CE], a collection of thirty-four jātaka tales related in an elegant and elliptical literary style. Each story includes Śūra's introduction relating the specific point of morality illustrated in the story. This narrative is in mixed prose and verse (a style that comes to be termed campū), with a variety of different meters employed. The beauty of Śūra's literary renderings was so renowned that the Jātakamālā often came to be even more widely read than the Jātaka collections themselves. In Tibet it is a custom for a senior monk to give an explanation of one of the tales from the Jātakamālā on the opening day of the Smon lam chen mo (Great Prayer Festival). The story surrounding the Chinese "translation" of the Jātakamālā, the Pusa benshengman lun ("Treatise on the Bodhisattva's Garland of Birth Stories"), may be one of the strangest tales in the annals of the translation of Buddhist texts. As modern scholarship has shown, the Chinese "translators" had so much difficulty in construing Śūra's elaborate style that they managed to produce an "apocryphal" scripture while having the Sanskrit text right in front of them. Working without dictionary or grammar, or the luxury of an Indian paṇḍita to help them construe the text, and apparently faced with an impossible deadline, the translators simply resorted to forgery: where they found a few random words of Śūra's that they could construe, they lifted wholesale from other texts stories that happened to contain the same words. Except for the titles of some of the stories, there is almost nothing in the Chinese translation that corresponds to Śūra's Sanskrit. (Source: "Jātakamālā." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 381–82. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)