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

possessed an immense folklore of superstitions, astrology, divinations based on the behavior of animals, nostrums, and animist deities such as sacred trees and springs. The word most often used to describe the quality of the Jataka stories is pasada, which is a unity of emotion and belief that avers something is so because one believes it to be so.

The personality cult of the Buddha appears even in the most fundamental text of Buddhist belief, the Dhammapada. Before the text begins there occurs the salutation Nammo tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa — "Homage to Him, the Exalted, the Worthy, the Fully Enlightened One". Every Buddhist rite begins similarly.

As with Christianity, it wasn't long before acting out the faith — pilgrimages, rituals, relics, devotional art — supplanted living it. Lesser gods derived from folk deities and deities from the Hindu pantheon — which were more like super-humans than true deities — came to occupy a place in Buddhism akin to saints in Catholicism. It is easier to deal with a human figure with human failings than with a remote patriarchal figure with supernatural knowledge. Unlike Christianity, the early Buddhist faithful did not turn for succor to arahats — fully enlightened humans which are the Buddhist equivalent of saints — but rather to their indigenous gods and the comforts of the unchanging behavior of nature. Faith of this kind is more a form of literature than a spiritual understanding, and thus are the Jatakas.

The same thing happened in Europe a millennium later. The missionaries to France and Ireland may have carved crosses on the Celtic menhirs and cut down the druids' oak forests to get rid of the sacred mistletoe, but beliefs in witchcraft and demons remained. To this day there are springs in the Poitou and Brittany regions of France where one can lift up stones and find coins underneath. The mother goddess in the Virgin Mary and the multitude of special-purpose saints reminds us how much closer Catholicism is to paganism than to Jesus. A revealing difference between Buddhist and Catholic psychology is that the principle architectural image designating the Catholic place of worship is the oversized penis of the spire and the locked womb of the tabernacle which only a priest may enter, while the Buddhist temple is marked by the breast-shaped dome of the dagoba and a vihara sanctuary anyone may enter.

In its doctrines of reincarnation and a multiplicity of Buddhas of which Gotama is only the most recent, Buddhism provided even more fertile ground for fantasy. Even in documents as ostensibly "pure" as the Pali Canon there are references to the Buddha remembering his former births. The Digha Nikaya Sutta, verse 14, mentions six, and verse 26 alludes to the Buddha's next incarnation as the Bodhisatta ("Future Buddha" as spelled in Pali) named Mitraiya — pronounced "Metteyya" — meaning "The Kindly One". Bodhisattas forego the release from suffering in this life via the path to Enlightenment taught by Gotama in order to return from samsara time after time to help those less spiritually developed.

However, when we read that these seven rebirths occur on seven lotus blossoms rather than via more traditional methods, we realize we are on the path to attachment, not Enlightenment. Supposedly there are an infinite number of Buddha rebirths because the world has no beginning or end. This view squares with the information provided by geology and anthropology about the way Genesis does. Historically, the doctrine of the Bodhisatta may have been adapted from the doctrines of the Jains, another reformist cult reacting against the selfish arrogance of Brahmanism about the time of the Buddha's own reforms. The Jatakas probably evolved into their mythopoetic form in order to make the abstractions of Buddhism more palatable to farmers and fishers who loved gaudy tales told by the village fireside and who were more keen on a good plot than on exemplary virtues.

Now matter how they originated, the Jatakas are miniature morality plays which focus on the ten moral perfections which lead to the spiritual path of the Buddha — benevolence, generosity, fortitude, and so on. Translated with scrupulous attention to their original language and form, the English versions of the Jatakas are a fusion of Milton's couplets with John Donne's prose ("Yea, would he fain have wished ...."). They are also quite long, with a profusion of subplots. Fortunately, a renowned Sri Lankan writer named Miss Sujatha Udugama has condensed a number of the Jatakas into the contemporary short story form, which are much more "readerfriendly" than the originals. The four Jatakas below have been condensed from Miss Udagama's renderings. They illustrate some of the literary devices the Jatakas employ. The first prefaces one morality

drama with another, the combination of which is a seeming nonsequitur until the moral itself is explained in the last few lines.

Baka Jataka: The Crane, the Fish, and the Crab

There once lived at Jetavana a monk who was an expert in the art of making robes. He could patch up the oldest of material most skillfully, dye it in deep orange, starch it and give it an exquisite silky finish, and make the robe look brand new. When a monk came to him with new material to make into a robe, he would exchange it for a ready-made robe, made with the old material. And, believing him, every monk who came to him went away with the ready-made robe. But one day the robe would become dirty, and when washed in hot water it faded and became bedraggled and all the patches showed. Now during this time there was yet another robe maker in a nearby hamlet, who at one time used to deceive everyone just like the monk at Jetavana, but had now reformed himself because he had tired of being caught in his lies. A monk who had been deceived complained to him, "There is a person just as mean as you once were. He takes new material, and supplies robes made with old cloth, thereby cheating all those who purchase robes from him." The robe maker from the hamlet made a beautiful robe from old cloth, dyed it in a lustrous shade of orange, and gave it the finest silky finish. He then wore this robe and paid a visit to monk at Jetavana. The moment the monk saw the robe he coveted it and felt he had never seen one so beautiful. He proposed to the robe maker from the hamlet to exchange the robe for some new cloth, saying, "Sir, we village brethren find it difficult to obtain cloth as fine as this for robe making." The hamlet robe maker let himself be persuaded, and went home with a fine piece of new cloth. The monk from Jetavana wore the robe with great pleasure. But after a time it became dirty and he washed it. All the flaws on the robe showed. It looked old and shabby and it was obvious he had been tricked by his own methods.

There once lived a kind and gentle spirit on a tree which stood near the lotus pond of a great forest. During the summer, the water in the pond would fall very low and the fish in it would be very uncomfortable and afraid.

One day a crane saw the fish in this pond and had a great desire to eat them. He perched himself on the pond and thought very deeply. The fish caught sight of him and asked, "What are you thinking of, Sir, as you perch there by yourself?" "I am thinking," the crane said, "of you, my dear fish. How very uncomfortable you must feel in this pond that is drying up. The heat is intense and your food is scarce." "What a strange thought," said the fish, "No one has ever thought of us fish like that. They only think of us as food when they are hungry, and that is what you are thinking of, too, isn't it?" "Oh no!" the crane said hurriedly. "I want to take you to another pond, which is large and beautiful and full of water. Five varieties of lotus blossoms are found in it, and trust me, I have no desire whatsoever to eat you. If you have any doubts, allow me to take one of you and I will show him the pond and then bring him back here safely to you."

Believing the crane, the fish gave him a very large fish, blind in one eye, which they felt would be a match for the crane, ashore or in the water. The crane took the large fish and flew him to the large pond. After he had seen the extent of it, the beauty and coolness of its water, the crane took the fish back to his companions. The one-eyed fish told them about the new pond and all the fish were eager to go there.

First of all, the crane took the one-eyed fish to the new pond. But instead of putting him in the water, the crane flew into a vaeana tree. There the crane squeezed him into a fork in a limb and pecked him to death and ate him, letting the bones fall at the foot of the tree. Then he flew back and said to the fish, "I have taken your friend to the pond. Who is the next one who wants to go there?"

Thus he took them all, one by one, and all of them met the same fate, adding to the pile of bones at the base of the tree.

When he came back to the pond for the last time he could find no more fish. There was only a lone crab. The crane felt like eating him,

too, and said to him, "I have taken all the fish away, to a pond fine and beautiful, and full of lotuses. Why not come? I shall be happy to take you there, too." "But how will you carry me?" asked the crab, who was suspicious about so fine a story. "I can take you on my beak," replied the crane.

The wily crab said, "Ah, but my shell is very slippery and I am afraid you might drop me. But if I take hold of your neck with my claws, I can hold on tight and then go to the pond with you."

The crane agreed to this. With his claws gripped the neck of the crane with pincers that, if he chose, could be as strong as the pincers of a smith. "Now you can take me to the pond," he said, "I won't fall off now."

The crane then flew to the pond and showed the crab the water. But then he turned towards the veaena tree on the bank. "The pond is the other way," said the crab, "why are you going this way?" "Do you think I am your slave to carry you around?" the crane replied angrily. "You see those bones under the tree? I ate up all the fish, just as now I am going to eat you." "You won't get that chance," said the crab. So saying, he tightened his claws around the crane's neck. With his beak wide open and tears coming from his eyes and trembling with fear, the crane said, "Please, Sir, I will not eat you. I will put you in the pond. Please...don't kill me!" "Then put me in the pond," ordered the crab.

The crane flew to the mud by the water and entered it. But the crab tightened his grip suddenly and nipped off the crane's head as easily as a knife cuts off a lotus stalk.

The Spirit of the Tree, who lived beside the pond, felt happy at what had taken place. He made the whole forest ring with the words he sighed with his leaves, "Guile profits not guileful folk. Mark what the crane got from the crab."

In one of his previous births the Bodhisatta was the Spirit of the Tree, the Jetavana robe maker was the crane, and the robe maker from the country was the crab.

Sammodamana Jataka: The Quarreling Quails

Long ago, when Brahamadatta was king, there lived in a forest a very good and wise quail with a following of many thousands of quails.

One day a fowler came into this forest to capture quails to make a living for himself by selling them in the market. The method he used to capture quails was this: He would whistle an imitation of a quail song from a distance and thus draw a number of them together. Then he would throw a net over them and beat the sides of the net to get them all to huddle together in the middle. Then he would take them out one by one and put them in a basket for the market.

This continued for a time, until at last the wise quail gathered all the quails together and spoke to them. "The fowler is harming us greatly, for he has already destroyed many of us. There is a way you can escape from him and his way of capturing you. The moment he casts his net over you, each of you must put your head through the mesh of the net and fly up and away together until you find a thorn thicket. Then you must land on that. After that you must remove your heads from the mesh, then creep through the thicket and fly back to your homes."

The quails could see the logic of this and agreed. The next day, when the fowler cast his net over them they did as they were advised. When they had allowed the net to fall over the thorn bushes, they crept away and flew home.

The fowler went all over in search of his net, and when he found the net, it was very difficult for him to get it out. He tore the net in many places and spent the whole day scratching and puncturing himself. Day after day this went on. He became very dejected and disappointed, and his wife grew angry and stamped her foot and berated him, "You come home empty handed every day. What is the meaning of this? Do you have another home to maintain elsewhere?" "Far from it," he said, very sad that his wife should think thus instead of helping him find a solution. "Those quails are very united

now. The moment I cast my net they fly up together and escape. Then they drop my net on thorn bushes. Anyway, very soon, I know they will begin quarreling among themselves, for everyone knows how quarrelsome they are. Then I can capture the whole lot, and then you will smile and stop making nasty remarks to me."

By and by, just as he had said, one of the quails accidentally trod on another's head when they alighted in a grain field. "Who trod on my head!?" the quail demanded angrily. "I did. But it was an accident. I didn't mean to do it," replied the guilty one.

But the other quail remained angry and said to the others, "I don't think he flies as hard as the rest of us when we lift up the net the fowler throws over us!"

Soon all the quails had taken up one side or the other and they all made a furious noise with their accusations. The wise quail leader heard these angry words and knew there would be no safety for the quails as long as they quarreled this way. He decided to go away, leaving the screeching quails to their battles, for he knew they were headed for destruction.

After a few days the fowler returned and by whistling their calls he managed to gather a good number of them together. Then he cast his net over them and herded them towards the middle. The quail whose head had been stepped on said to the other, "They say when you don't lift the net because you're afraid your feathers will get mussed." The other quail retorted, "They say your wings molt when you lift the net, so go ahead, lift the net by yourself.

On and on they bickered like this until before they knew it the fowler was putting them into the basket for the market. "At least!" his wife said, and she was all smiles and joy welcoming him.

The Bodhisatta, in one of his previous births, was the good and wise quail who knows the power of unity. The foolish quails were Devadatta, who is always trying to destroy the wisdom of the Bodhisatta.

Serivanija Jataka: The Two Hawkers

Long ago in the kingdom of Seri there lived a hawker of pots and pans named Serivan. He was very wise, kind, and gentle, and had a serene appearance on his face. In the same kingdom there was also another hawker who traded in pots and pans. Unlike Serivan he was wicked, greedy, and selfish, and had an angry appearance on his face. Each day he would cross the Televaha River and hawk his wares from street to street in the town of Andhapura.

In that town dwelt a very poor family, the only survivors being a young girl and her grandmother. They came from a family of very wealthy merchants who had lost everything during a raid from marauding bandits, including all male members of the family. The two women now lived in penury, earning what little they could by working for others.

However, they had in their house a collection of old pots, and a beautifully shaped eating bowl which in the old days the head of the household would eat from. Now it was brown with dirt and grit and looked shabby.

One day, to their door came the greedy hawker, shouting out loud, "Water pots for sale! Pans for sale!" When the girl heard him she wanted her grandmother to buy a new water pot because the one she carried to the town well had a crack in it and lost half its water on the return to their home. The grandmother told her they could not afford a new pot, and the girl suggested, "Perhaps we can exchange some of our old pots for a new pot." She picked up the eating bowl and continued, "Why can't we exchange this old bowl? It is useless to us."

The grandmother asked the hawker to come in. He sat down and showed him the bowl. He weighed it in his hand and looked at it, and immediately suspected it was made of gold. He took a knife from his pocket and scratched the pot. Indeed, it was gold, and worth very much money.

But being greedy, the hawker immediately devised a plan to get the pot for nothing, not even the exchange of a water pot. He

pretended to be angry, threw the pot aside, saying, "Why do you waste my time on this? This is worth nothing!" So saying, he arose from his seat and left the house.

The granddaughter was upset at the man's behavior. She knew of Serivan's reputation for honesty and went to fetch him. He came to their house. The grandmother was surprised and a bit upset at the girl. "Why did you waste his time?" she said angrily, "There is no point in showing him the bowl another hawker doesn't want."

But the granddaughter was determined to get a new water pot. "This man," she replied, "has a kind and serene face. He will not insult us or be rude to two poor and lonely people like us." So the grandmother brought the bowl to the hawker.

He weighed it in his hand and looked at the scratch and said, "Mother, this bowl is made of gold and worth a lakh (a hundred thousand) pieces of money at least. I do not have that much coin with me." "Sir," the grandmother said, "the first man who called said this bowl is not worth even a water pot and he threw it aside. Surely, your kindness and compassion has turned it from clay into gold. So take it away, and give us what is fair for it."

At the time the hawker had only five hundred pieces of money and a stock of pots worth very much more. He gave all these to the grandmother and said, "I will weigh this pot on my scales and return to you with many pieces of money."

Placing the golden bowl under his cloak, he retained eight money pieces for the boatman across the river and back.

Only moments after he had disappeared around the corner and into the streets, the first hawker returned to the woman's house and told her he had decided after all to trade her a water pot for the bowl. The grandmother shouted, "You said the bowl wasn't worth even a water pot. But we asked Serivan and he said it was worth a lakh of money pieces. He has already taken it away."

The greedy hawker beat his temples and cried, "That cheater! He has robbed me of a hundred thousand money pieces! He has caused me great loss! I shall go to the king about him!" He was so angry he tore his upper garments and ran to the river to try to catch Serivan. He reached the water and saw Serivan's boat already halfway across.

The hawker plunged into the water chasing after the boat. But his hatred was so great he paid no attention to the swift-flowing water. He lost his footing and was carried away and drowned, berating Serivan until his head disappeared under the water. He returned in the next life as a water wheel, condemned to constantly be drowned and then revived while doing other people's work for them.

Serivan was the Bodhisatta and his enemy Dewadatta was the selfish hawker.

Kaccha-Apa Jataka: The Tortoise Who Loved His Home Too Much

A family in Savvhati was once stricken by malaria fever. The parents said to their son, "Make a hole in the wall and escape somewhere to save your life." Come back after the malaria has passed, for under this house is buried our family treasure. You can get it and carry on our family." The young man returned after the malaria had passed and found everyone in his household had died. He recovered the treasure and re-began the family line. On another occasion a man laden with oil, butter, clothes, and other offerings called at Jetavana and sat unknowingly beside the Bodhisatta, and engaged him in conversation. The man told that there had recently been cholera in the city and he had escaped it by fleeing his house and staying outside of the city. The Bodhisatta listened to him and later addressed a crowd as follows: "In the days of old, when there arose some danger, there were some people too fond of their homes to leave them, and they perished. Those who left their homes went to a safe place and saved themselves." Then he told them this tale:

Long years ago, when Brahmadutta reigned, the Bodhisatta was in one of his previous births as the son of a village potter. This son himself became a potter and had a wife and family to support.

He collected his clay at a massive shallow lake near a river. When it rained the river and lake grew so full they were one large sheet of

water. But during the dry weather they separated and the lake dried up. As the waters slowly receded, the fish and tortoises that lived in the lake eating insects and water plants swam back to the river.

But one tortoise chose not to go back to the river, saying, "I was born here and I grew up here. This is my parents' home. I cannot leave it!"

As the waters disappeared and the lake bed began to crack, the tortoise dug a deep hole and buried himself in the soft, wet mud. Sadly, it was in the very place where the potter came every year to collect clay for his pots. As he dug his wooden spade into the mud he struck the tortoise and cracked open its shell, then turned the mudcaked tortoise over onto the ground as if it was a large stone in the clay. The tortoise in its agony began to moan the song

Here was I born and here I lived, my refuge was the clay; And now the clay has played me false in a grievous way. Thee I call my potter friend, hear what I have to say! Go where you can find happiness, wherever the place may be; Where the wise neither birthplace nor home need to see; Where happiness is life, not the death that masters thee!

Thus the tortoise spoke to the potter until he died. The potter picked him up, and, hailing for all the people of the village to come and see, said to them, "Look at this tortoise. When the fish and the other tortoises went to the river, this one stayed because he was too fond of his home. Do you see what happens when you become too attached to your things? Take care not to say to yourself, 'I have sight, I have hearing, I have smell, I have taste, I have touch, I have sons, I have daughters, I have men and maids in my service, I have gold.' Do not cleave to these things, or you will die singing the song of the tortoise."

The potter was the Bodhisatta and the tortoise was Ananda, the faithful disciple of the Buddha, in a previous birth.

The real life and times of the Buddha are almost as much a mix of fantasy and reality as these tales. Buddhist literature religiofies the simple story of a man named Siddhattha Gotama (as it is spelled in Pali) who was born to a king who wished to shield him from the vicissitudes of the world. The young man is said to have been kept in a pleasure palace with only the finest foods, tastiest sweets, and prettiest courtesans. He married and fathered a son, but became disillusioned with court life and wanted to see the world. Disobeying his father, he left the palace grounds four times to venture into the world. He was horrified at the sufferings of everyday people. At the age of twenty-nine he left his palace and wife on the day his son was born, crossed a river which bordered the kingdom, cut off his beautiful long black hair, and went off to find a way to end suffering. In time he discovered that the extremes of indulgence in sense pleasures or the extreme deprivations of asceticism provided no answers.

Six years later he was in a town named Gaya some distance from the city of Benares (modern-day Varanasi); there he recalled a childhood incident in which he had sat under a rose-apple tree and had entered a state of meditation. It occurred to him to return to that meditation; perhaps it was the answer. He made a cushion of grass under a ficus tree and vowed to meditate until either the answers or death came. That night, as the May full moon rose during his meditation, he rediscovered the "middle Way" of the ancient sages, which rejects extremes of pleasure and pain. From then until his eightieth year he taught his doctrines to the world. The Enlightenment that came over him is called nibbana, and consists of the four truths which are the core of Buddhism:

All life is suffering.

The cause of suffering is attachment to self-centered desire.

When one foresakes self-centered desire, suffering will be extinguished.

The Noble Eightfold Path eliminates desire:

= Sila, or right living, is the moral behavior of right speech, right action, and right thought;

= Samadhi is equanimity of mind brought about by the meditation goals of right exertion, right attentiveness, and right concentration;

=Panna is the wisdom and insight achieved through right aspiration and right understanding.

Most Westerners accept an interpretation of the world according to beliefs devised by scholars and scientists, which describes a linear progression of human development starting with isolated huntergatherer tribes which led to nomads which became pastoralists who provided enough food for urban agglomerations to develop. If this explanation is accepted the Gotama Buddha was historical rather than metaphysical figure, a unique human who was a great reformer and teacher, but nonetheless only a single person who died and will never be with us again except in the legacy of his teachings.

Buddhists see the matter differently. To them, life is endless in the past and future. When Gotama realized the Dhamma or "Truth" under the Bodhi tree, he rediscovered an eternal Truth which is periodically uttered by great spiritually aware geniuses who arise in the universe and who are able to entirely renounce the self — the ego — so the Truth may enter them. These geniuses also possess the compassion to teach the Truth to the world so others also may attain it. Each Buddha arrives after a long succession of previous lives in which the Buddha-to-be brings to perfection a sublime virtue, called paramis. During this Bodhisatta stage in which Buddhas-to-be return from samsara time after time to help others achieve Enlightenment, they make their initial vow to follow the Path at the feet of a Buddha and return periodically to this Buddha to renew their vows during a long period which will end in Enlightenment and full Buddha-hood.

This illustrates a fundamental difference between Sri Lankan thinking as compared with our own. We believe truths are constantly being discovered and that when proven wrong by the evidence of reason or experience they are no longer truths. Hence there are no real "truths" but only facts which are valid at the moment.

Many Sri Lankans, however, hold that the Truth is a changeless principle which was discovered by great sages long long ago and is gradually forgotten until periodic geniuses like Gotama come along to rediscover it through meditation and mindfulness. The "Three Clear Knowledges" all Buddhas discover at the moment of Enlightenment are:

The fact of former existences

The mechanism of kamma in which those who do evil are reborn in miserable states and those who do good are born in higher states

The knowledge that there are four walls to the trap of samsara, the cycle of rebirths which result in unenlightened life being led over and over. These walls are: sensual desire, the desire for existence, the addiction to having views, and ignorance.

Was Gotama's transformation into a Buddha in the sixth century B.C. mere happenstance, or were there events that precipitated it?

Modern scholars and archaeologists have pieced together a fairly comprehensive picture of social and economic life during the time when Gotama lived. This research does not change any of the tenets of Gotama's teaching, but gives a much clearer view of the society to which he addressed them. The Jatakas support archaeological evidence with literary evidence. They provide through the devices of allusion, metaphor, and physical description a detailed picture of daily life and social attitudes during Gotama's time. One can smell the cooking fires he passed, the faces he saw, feel his feet squishing into the muddy roads of the monsoon or becoming coated with dust during the dry season. No other period in human history is as fertile in original spiritual creativity than the century leading up to

Buddhism. Confucianism came into existence shortly after 551 B.C., which is generally regarded as Confucius's birthday. Buddhism was finalized about 483 B.C., when Gotama passed into parinibbana. About 599 B.C. a reformer named Mahavira founded Jainism. Taoism was founded by Lao Tzu about 604 B.C. Japan's Shinto is said to have no specific date of origination, but was the religion of the first Japanese emperor about 660 B.C. Zoroastrianism's roots also may predate it recognized founding date, but it, too, came into eminence about 660 B.C. About the same time, Judaism's great prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah spoke from their Babylonian exile. And finally, the Greek world was alive with an Olympian potpourri of gods, titans, sibyls, Pythics, Bacchantes, Orphics, shamans, Eleusians, and mere humans, who happened to have names like Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus. Heady brew, even quaffed over a hundred and fifty-odd years.

The spiritual beliefs of the Aryan peoples who entered the Indus Valley about 1500 B.C. were not directly recorded. They may have picked up some proto-Zoroastrian beliefs on their way through the country whose name still commemorates them: Iran. They overran the cities of Mojandaro and Harappa, which had been in existence from at least 6000 B.C. Over the next thousand years they spread first east and then south over the Ganges Plain, where they gradually evolved from raiders to herders to rice cultivators — and brahmins.

The major impetus towards paddy cultivation was the discovery that transplanting rice from a germinating bed to flooded paddy fields while the plants are still shoots increases their yield approximately five times. For the first time cultivators had a surplus beyond their family and seed-crop needs. In fact, the surplus was so great that it surpassed the needs of even the notoriously grasping local petty despots. This meant there was enough food to make possible a society in which not everyone needed to farm or perform religious functions. That in turn permitted the rise of towns and the various artisans and traders that towns require. The Jataka of the two hawkers describes two townships separated by a river. There is a public well, and artisans such as potters and goldsmiths exist. The cheating robe maker testifies to yet another occupation demanded by towns.

Sometimes the testimony of the Jatakas is subtle. The potter who accidentally kills the tortoise in the Kaccha-Apa Jataka does so with a wooden, not iron, spade. Indeed, there is little archaeological evidence of the use of iron, although it is mentioned in passing in the Pali suttas written in the last half-century before Christ. Archaeologists have found some remnants of cast and beaten iron in the Bihar area where Gotama preached, but the warm, wet, acidic soil in that area has undoubtedly rusted away iron implements to the extent that we really have no idea how extensive their use was. No identifiable remnant of a plowshare has yet been found, which implies that the labor required to mattock over every square foot of a rice paddy would keep a cultivator so busy he would be unavailable for forced labor or labor in fief to build palaces or fight wars. That meant kings would resort to the sons of those better off, or raise mercenary armies from other regions. Indeed, the constant use of mercenaries so intermingled populations on a given territory of land that we still witness the racial conflicts of two or more longestablished peoples claiming a single piece of territory. The Tamil struggle in northern Sri Lanka goes back in a direct line to the Tamil mercenaries used by Lankan kings fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.

The minimal availability of iron also determined the character of cities. Iron may not be necessary to the cutting of stone, but abundant labor is. The precise stonework of the Indus cities was shaped without iron chisels. The Egyptians cut the granite for their pyramids and fortified cities without the use of iron. The Aztec and Inca cities of the Americas also were built without it. Where stone suitable for building existed, it was quarried by chipping holes in a line using harder stones, placing wood chocks into the holes, flooding them with water until the wood swelled and the stone split free. It was transported by being pulled by draft animals (elephants in India, mules or humans elsewhere) over coconut trunks or other logs laid down like a series of rollers. Harder stone tools made of materials like basalt could be used to laboriously pulverize fragments until a stone was surprisingly plane and smooth.

All this required enormous amounts of labor, and until the Sri Lankans devised their enormous irrigation system several centuries

after Gotama, royal economics was limited to the surplus of one rice crop a year-when, indeed, there was a surplus. Hence few in Gotama's time enjoyed the luxury of stone buildings — or for that matter, even fired brick. The lakebed mud sought by the potter who accidentally killed the tortoise could also be shaped into bricks. Some were kilnfired, but most were sun-dried, and these eventually washed back into their elemental earth by long centuries of monsoons. To this day, fired bricks in Bihar are as rare an archaeological find as iron tools. The little remaining physical evidence indicates that at the time Gotama lived most human habitations were of mud and stick construction — as indeed many are in today's Indian and Sri Lankan countryside.

Six hundred years later, when the kings of Anuradhapura in ancient Lanka had built enough reservoirs and irrigation sluices to guarantee a year-round supply of water for cultivation — thus making possible ancient Lanka's two-crop economy which was the envy of every petty despot in south India — the simultaneous development of iron-making provided them with chisels hard enough to cut the tough granite into smooth columns, lintels, doorway carvings, statues of the Buddha. Two crops of rice per year meant a considerable surplus, and that meant enough food to employ enough workers to build Lanka's great and beautiful cities. Buddhism in Lanka thrived in a way it never did in India. One reason for this was the powerful water-based economy underlying it. Sri Lanka's most famous non-Sri Lankan writer, Arthur C. Clarke, describes the impact of irrigation on ancient Lankan civilization this way:

It is hard to plan for the future when the sun beats down from a cloudless sky, the waves whisper softly up the beach, the terraced fields of ripening paddy seduce the eye with their soft greens and golds. The men of the cold north believe that the tropics are hostile to civilization because the struggle for existence can be too easily won. There is much truth in this, but there are also times when the sun and drought can provoke as great a response as storm and snow. This happened in Ceylon before the beginning of the Christian era, when a series of tremendous irrigation works transformed the island's dry zone into what must have been a

fertile paradise. Some of the artificial lakes created then are many kilometers in circumference; there are thousands of these "tanks", linked by intricate networks of canals. Only a stable, wellorganized, and technically advanced society could have undertaken such massive projects. Such a society was seldom allowed to exist in peace for long, and successive invasions destroyed much of the work of the ancient [Lankan] engineers.1

1. Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller; 2nd ed., Studio Times Limited, Colombo, 1983.

The transition from cattle-keeping to paddy farming and towns brought problems of its own. Cattle provided energy, milk, and dung for fuel as long as they lived. Hence the brahminical injunction against killing cattle, which transformed in the Hindu religion into cattle being worshipped as gods which must never be killed, much less eaten.

Cattle raising is essentially a dry-land affair. Paddies, on the other hand, keep cultivators up to their knees, and sometimes their waists, in muds which are a fertile breeding ground for parasites, molds, and insects. Malaria and dengue fever are propagated by water-breeding mosquitoes, and cholera spreads through drinking water contaminated by excrement. As the agricultural development of the Ganges basin turned south in search of new land, farmers encountered a wetter, warmer climate that was perfect for microbe and insect growth.

Although cultivators would develop resistances over many generations, their thinly spread populaces made transmission more difficult. The same could not be said for the rapidly evolving towns. The Jataka of the tortoise is preceded by a brief story involving an epidemic. The point of the story is that one must not become attached to things, for possessions will not prevent — and may even bring about — suffering and death.

Today the term the Buddha Gotama employed to describe suffering — dukkha — is often interpreted as "the unsatisfactoriness of life", the sense that if one looks beyond material complacencies, there

is something fundamentally empty in a life lacking spiritual direction. In Gotama's time, "suffering" was probably more literally that. Plagues of mosquitoes and flies, the unrelieved pains of aging which herbal nostrums could do nothing to relieve, fear of the unpredictability of the weather, loss of limbs resulting from trivial injuries which became infected, cataracts for which there was no known cure, the untimely deaths of loved ones, the uncontrolled growth of families attended by the necessary subdivision of one's lands at death, bandits on the rutted muddy tracks that passed for roads (the first paved road in India was not built until the 1400s), on and on.

The brahminical religious tradition was hard-pressed to deal with this sudden accretion of problems, many of them exacerbated by the population density of towns. The brahmins became hostile to towns in general, as their tradition relied on a rigid hierarchy of social roles, the credulity of villagers, and particularistic rules geared to the maintenance of their own material well-being. Ignorant villagers were eager to pay those who promised salvation but town dwellers were far less sanguine.

When Gotama began to teach, he was as much at home in the towns as in the countryside. One reason for his comfort within large populaces is that the story of his being the pampered son of a king is probably a romanticized enhancement of the facts. His birthplace was a town named Kapilavatthu located on the border between what is now India and Nepal, at the north end of a region then called Magadha. Today it is called "Bihar" — a name which is a distant corruption of the place-name, "Land of the Viharas", because of the large numbers of them spread over the countryside.

Gotama's father was more probably the leader of a community called a Sakya, meaning "clan" rather than a king in the sense of a Maharaja. The most common Sanskrit epithet for Gotama himself is Sakyamuni, meaning "Sage of the Sakyas". Sakya communities had no hierarchy; they were essentially a seniorial polity in which elders met in council to discuss their problems and reached agreement by consensus. This was very different from the rigid hierarchical system of the brahmins. Indeed, one reason Gotama was able to see through the defects of the brahminical system is that he probably never

encountered it until he left his family and traveled south through Magadha. One notable scholar, Richard Gombrich, believes there is evidence that Gotama's mother did not speak an Aryan IndoEuropean language. Later, when he formed his Sangha to carry the message of the Four Noble Truths leading to Enlightenment, he organized it along the same casteless lines as the Sakya community from which he came.

Bihar is in the central Ganges plan, where towns were evolving quickly into cities in Gotama's time. Cities invite trade, traders need coinage, coinage implies mines, mines imply territory to protect, and territory implies kings. Kingdoms in Gotama's times were less a matter of circumscribed boundaries than a field of influence centered on a king whose strength, like that of light, weakened with distance. The object of war was not to take territory but to kill its king.

This was the rapidly evolving world into which Gotama walked, and he came just as the power base of the brahmins in the villages was eroding and a spiritually directionless populace was emerging in the towns.

One reaction to this was a sudden bloom of experiments with nonbrahminacal ideas. Four known sects emerged in the Bihar region about the time of Gotama:

Skeptics rejected Brahmanism altogether and proposed that Truth probably did not exist, and even if it did, it was unknowable and unattainable. Like their Greek counterparts with the same name a few centuries later, they were excellent debaters and prided themselves on being able to escape any argument.

Materialists (the Lokayata sect) believed that the world was composed of four elements. In the case of living beings, these elements slowly decomposed after death. There was no afterlife, and poor man and king are governed by the same fatalistic rules. Therefore, one should take as much pleasure from life as possible. This view is remarkably like that of the Greek Epicurians.

Determinists (the Ajivaka sect) believed that the final end of all things was preordained long ago and nothing could be done to alter the progression of the universe towards ultimate perfection, although the end of time was long eons away.

Jains (the Moksha sect) were followers of a religious reformer named Mahavira, who lived about the same time as Gotama. Jainism is the only other sect besides Buddhism that still exists today. Jains believe that life is extremely painful and one can attain complete moksha — complete liberation — only by wearing away all karmic accretions in this life through extreme mortification and faultless moral conduct. Jains believe that all karma, good or bad, is bondage. Hence they are especially concerned with the karmic consequences of killing living beings. Some carry this to the end of wearing gauze masks so as not to inhale microscopic creatures and sweeping the ground ahead of them to clear away insects. Extremist Jains hold that the best course in life is to do nothing at all, which by implication means starving to death. Why self-killing is different from killing other beings isn't made clear. Even today members of the Digambara sect of the Jains go about naked after having plucked all their body hair out by the roots. They eat only once a day and that only with what they can gather and hold in their hands. They refuse to wash, clean their teeth, or live under shelters. They carry possessionless to the point of never sleeping more than one night in a particular place.

To these four negative reactions against brahmanism, Gotama replied with a positive reaction: spiritual enlightenment based on meditation and a humanistic code of conduct. The analogy of healing has often been used to describe his four fundamental tenets (The Four Noble Truths): the complaint is diagnosed as dukkha or the sense that life is unfulfilling; the cause of the ailment is tanha or the "thirst" for satisfaction via the things of the world; the cure is eliminating the cause of the ailment; and the medicine prescribed is the Noble Eightfold Path, through which one can achieve nibbana or Enlightenment.

The core of Gotama Buddha's belief is that humans are responsible only to themselves for their welfare here and hereafter, and we attain a final beatitude solely through our own efforts, not via divine aid. In fact, the Buddha said many times that one can believe in and even worship all the gods he or she wants, but those gods won't help one achieve Enlightenment.

No written records have come down to us which date to the time of the Buddha. Perhaps some form of writing existed, but if it follows the pattern of the transition between oral and written culture in other areas of the world, the proto-writing of the Buddha's time probably served a tally or accounting function. The Buddha's own words were carried in the memories of hundreds of monks and weren't recorded in writing at Aluvihara in central Lanka until over four centuries after the Buddha's parinibbana.

The Jatakas were popularizations of the intellectual concepts in the Buddha's thought. Each tale usually confines itself to one moral principal or aspect of the Buddha's teaching. The moral is always tidily explained at the end for those who may have missed it in the complex imagery and poetic rhythm of the stories.

But far more important, the Jatakas give us a sense of the timbre of life in the Buddha's time and somewhat after. They paint a picture of the ordinary person's daily round of existence during a time when an extraordinary person walked the earth. In analogies closer to our time, if we really want to know what life was like when Francis I was consolidating France into a nation, we don't read his proclamations or the disputations at the University of Paris, we read Rabelais. If we really want to know what court life was like in medieval Japan, we don't read the edicts of shoguns or monks, we read Lady Murasaki's Tale of the Genji, the world's first novel, written about the year 1000.

The Jataka mix of rural folklore and urban daily life tells us much about Gotama which he does not tell about himself. That the folksy, easygoing Jatakas were ideally suited for their purpose is indicated by two facts: (a) Nearly three-quarters of the Sangha during the Buddha's life were located outside towns but near enough to them that the monks knew well the ways of town life; and (b) the Buddha's village support was strongly based on gahapati, or "heads of households", who comprised the all-powerful decision-making village councils. To have appealed equally well to the sophisticated urban palate and the conservative ways of the village implies that the Buddha was perceived as the bearer of the great Truths discovered long ago by the sages.

What the Jatakas illustrate are not merely vivid glimpses of daily life in the Buddha's time. They also show why his teaching reached as

deeply into the traditional village as it did into the powerful towns and cities. It is no surprise that when the brahmins realized how quickly they were losing their fear-based mastery over people, they turned the Buddha and his teachings into yet another god in the pantheon of Hinduism.

In Lanka Buddhism retained its original character, and has remained so all the way into our times. To this day the Jatakas are recited at village campfires and are the subjects of TV docudramas. When a Buddhist dies, his family holds vigil over the casket the night before cremation. By candlelight they read the last of them all, Number 547, the Vessantara Jataka. The family members read in rounds the lesson of Prince Vessantara, who attained the perfection of generosity by giving away first all his material possessions, then his lands, then his wife and children, and finally his life.