Chapter title
Tales from the Jatakas The development of Buddhism paralleled that of Christianity as the simplicity of the message became lost amid the worshipful fantasies of the message-bearers. The more the disciples, the more the embellishments. Jesus's memory had only twelve followers to contend with; the Buddha's memory had over three hundred. Neither desired a personality cult. Had Jesus known what Saul of Tarsus would do to his teaching, he probably would have omitted the lightning bolt from Saul's list of lifestyles. The Buddha's teaching was in even a worse position, as it was communicated solely by word of mouth for over five centuries after he passed into parinibbana. If Jesus would be hard-pressed to find himself — much less his words and even still less his deeds — in Chartres cathedral the day they consecrated it in 1260, imagine the Buddha's reaction if he were to wander through the Rock Temple of Dambulla today, with its 360odd statues of himself in every imaginable meditative position and its 20,000 square feet of frescos depicting, among other things, 547 stories of his lives before reincarnating in the body of Siddartha Gotama in the fifth century B.C. Visually, Dambulla is as splendid as any manmade object on Earth, but the message is hardly one of nonattachment. These 557 stories are called Jatakas. They are hand-me-down legends from a much older storytelling tradition for which the life of the Buddha was perfectly suited for recasting into morality tales. The Jatakas have nothing to do with the Pali Canon, which is the Theravada sect's compilation of the Buddha's words as recorded on ola-leaf manuscript by 500 Buddhist reciters and scribes between 35 and 32 B.C. at the monastery of Aluvihara near the contemporary town of Matale. Rather, the Jatakas slowly evolved from stories told by the laity — at that time composed mainly of farmers and villagers who already 209
