The Jataka or Stories of the Buddha's Former Births :Translated from the Pali by Various Hands (Set of 3 Books in 6 Parts)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

It was an almost isolated incident in Greek literary history', when Pythagoras claimed to remember his previous lives. Heracleides Ponticus relates that he professed to have been once born as Ætha- lides, the son of Hermes, and to have then obtained as a boon from his father ζῶντα καὶ τελευτῶντα μνήμην ἔχειν τῶν συμβαινόντων". Consequently he remeinbered the Trojan war, where, as Euphorbus, he was wounded by Menelaus, and, as Pythagoras, he could still recognise the shield which Menelaus had hung up in the temple of Apollo at Branchidæ; and similarly he remembered his subsequent birth as Hermotimus, and then as Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos. But in India this recollection of previous lives is a common feature in the histories of the saints and heroes of sacred tradition; and it is especially mentioned by Manu as the effect of a self-denying and pious life. The doctrine of Metempsychosis, since the later Vedic period, has played such an important part in the history of the national character and religious ideas that we need not be surprised to find that Buddhist literature from the earliest times (although giving a theory of its own to explain the transmigration) has always included the ages of the past as an authentic background to the founder's historical life as Gautama. Jataka legends occur even in the Canonical Pitakas; thus the Sukha-vihari Jataka and the Tittira Jataka, which are respectively the 10th and the 37th in this volume, are found in the Culla Vagga, vii. 1 and vi. 6, and similarly the Khandhavatta Jataka, which will be given in the next volume, is found in the Culla Vagga v. 6; and there are several other examples.