A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s3.t2.172

v2.c19.s3.t2.172

Not all the Jātakas, however, were received into the canon when the work of combining them into a book was begun.⁴ Indeed, it is difficult to determine how much of the Jātaka book, as we have it, belongs to the canon, for we do not possess the original canonical Jātaka, but merely a commentary on it. In this commentary, every single Jātaka consists of the following parts: (1) An introductory story, Paccuppannavatthu, *i.e.* "story of the present time," relating on what occasion the Buddha himself told the monks the Jātaka in question; (2) a prose narrative, Atītavatthu, *i.e.* “story of the past,” in which a story of one of the former births of the Buddha, in other words a Bodhisatta story, is told; (3) the Gāthās, *i.e.* stanzas, which, as a rule, form part of the “story of the past,” but which are very often, too, a part of the “story of the present time”;¹ (4) short commentary (Veyyākaraṇa) in which the Gāthās are explained word for word; and (5) the “connexion” (Samodhāna)² in which, finally (again by Buddha himself) the personages of the “story of the present” are identified with those of the “story of the past.” This huge narrative work in the form of a commentary, the Jātakaṭṭhavaṇṇanā, or “elucidation of the meaning of the Jātakas,”³ is the work of an unknown Singhalese monk,¹ who took his materials from an earlier commentary on the Jātakas, the Jātakaṭṭhakathā. This last-named work, as indeed the Aṭṭhakathās in general, is said to have been written in Pāli immediately after the canon, brought to Ceylon with the canon itself, there translated into the Old Singhalese language, and then translated back again into Pāli by the compiler of the Jātakaṭṭhavaṇṇanā.² It is only the prose, however, which was translated into Singhalese and then translated back again ; the Gāthās were preserved unchanged in Pāli. According to tradition, it is only these Gāthās, the stanzas, which were included in the canon.³ This tradition is probably correct in so far as both prose and verse originally came down orally ; but the prose naturally had a less stable form than the stanzas, so that when the canon was compiled, and later on, when it was written down, only the verses retained their original form, whilst, in the case of the prose, the rendering of it was at first entrusted to the reciters, and it was only at a later period committed to writing by commentators.