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जातकमालपञ्जिका
Jātakamālapañjikā
སྐྱེས་པའི་རབས་ཀྱི་རྒྱུད་ཀྱི་དཀའ་འགྲེལ་པ
skyes pa'i rabs kyi rgyud kyi dka' 'grel pa
A Commentary on the Difficult Points of the "Garland of Birth Stories" (84000)
Text
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Description
The Jātakamālāpañjikā (Tib. Skyes pa'i rabs kyi rgyud kyi dka' 'grel pa, "An Explanation of the Difficult Points of the Words in the Jātaka-mālā") is a commentary by Vīryasiṃha on Āryaśūra's Jātakamālā, preserved in the Derge Tengyur (Toh. no. 4460, vol. PO/212, folios 275v.1–312v.1) and the only work by this author recorded there. True to its title, the commentary proceeds through the root text glossing individual difficult words and phrases rather than offering a continuous paraphrase, opening with its own verses of homage to the Buddha and bodhisattvas before turning to the Jātakamālā itself. Alongside this word-level exegesis, Vīryasiṃha addresses broader interpretive questions about the text's structure—organizing the thirty-four jātakas according to the six perfections (giving, discipline, patience, and so on) and noting where opinions differ on the count and order of subdivisions within each—and records a view held by some that Āryaśūra's work was left unfinished, a question he treats as needing further examination rather than settling outright. According to the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, it is this commentary that is the source of the tradition that Āryaśūra originally intended to compose one hundred jātaka tales, of which only thirty-four are known to survive.
Reference
Vīryasiṃha. jātakamālapañjikā [जातकमालपञ्जिका]. skyes pa'i rabs kyi rgyud kyi dka' 'grel pa [སྐྱེས་པའི་རབས་ཀྱི་རྒྱུད་ཀྱི་དཀའ་འགྲེལ་པ]. [A Commentary on the Difficult Points of the "Garland of Birth Stories" (84000)]. Tengyur, RKTST 3785 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3785&typ=2.
Interconnections
1 Classical commentary of
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.)
