Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c2.33

c2.33

We have set ourselves to the arduous task of presenting, as far as possible, a clear and comprehensive portrait of ancient Indian Society as reflected in the *Jātaka* stories. We have slowly but carefully gone through the whole of this huge collection, noted down each and every single fact contained in it and, in the end, tried to arrange the facts thus collected in a systematic narrative form. During this process, moreover, each and every fact has been minutely examined in the light of literary and other evidence of the surrounding period. We have already admitted that all the stories in this collection are handled by a compiler or compilers of about the 5th century A.D. And we have also shown that the major portion of the material thus handled had come down through several centuries. But we again lay the utmost emphasis on this fact, that the compiler (or compilers) had focussed his (or their) attention on the days before the birth of the Buddha. As we in these days, while narrating stories to our children, fix our eyes on the period of which we may be speaking, taking care that modern things and individuals do not find their way in our narrations, so must have the *Jātaka* compiler taken care to see that the stories he handled were not out of tune with the pre-Buddhistic conditions of society as he himself had come to know through tradition and literature. Thus it was that a fair degree of homogeneity was accomplished for this collection of stories. This homogeneity will readily be discerned from the presentation given in the following pages. It will be seen that the political, administrative, social, economic and even geographical conditions, as herein presented, quite harmoniously fit in the pre-Buddhistic period, as our knowledge of post-Vedic and post-Buddhist periods shows. What we mean to say is, that the stories on the whole give us a harmonious and a homogeneous picture of the pre-Buddhistic period. You may question the existence of a particular article, or thing, or place or individual, or raise doubts about a particular form of administrative, social, economic or religious institution. These doubts may or may not prove to be true. At least to us they would seem difficult, if not impossible, to be satisfied finally. It is not our task, even if it were possible, to test independently each single piece of prose-story and every single gāthā as regards its age. We only say this, that the stories are decidedly of different periods—from the Vedic period down to the 5th century A. D., that the gāthās do claim a greater antiquity than the prose—for which reason we have throughout this work given the number of the gāthās whenever any references are taken from them¹ but that the stories as a whole are homogeneous in their presentation of things of the pre-Buddhistic age.