Unit 14 · Jatakas and Hard Questions

The Pali collection holds 547 Jataka tales. Each one is set in a frame with three parts. First comes the story of the present: something happens among the Buddha’s monks, and he is asked about it. Then comes the story of the past: the Buddha tells of an event in one of his former lives. Last comes the identification.

In the identification, the Buddha, as the text presents him, names who was who. The wise hare, he says, was I. The foolish monkey was a certain monk. The kind king was my father. The frame ties the old story to the people listening, and it teaches that lives connect through karma and rebirth, as Buddhists believe.

Only the verses of the Jatakas are counted as canonical in the Theravada Pali Canon. The prose stories around them come from a commentary, the Jatakatthavannana, compiled in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE. The Cowell edition, translated by several scholars between 1895 and 1907, puts both into English and is in the public domain.

A fable often ends with a moral stated in one line. A Jataka does more. It sets up a hard situation, puts a character in it, and shows what that character chooses and what follows. The reader sees a quality in action. In this sense the story is an argument: it gives reasons, through events, for living a certain way.

Many Jatakas were told before the Buddha’s time as folk tales. Scholars think Buddhist storytellers took some of them and added the frame. The same animal fable might appear in the Panchatantra, a Sanskrit collection of animal tales, and in the Jatakas, with different lessons drawn. The frame turns a folk tale into a Buddhist teaching.

Monks use Jatakas in sermons. Artists paint them on temple walls. Parents tell them at bedtime. Scholars such as Naomi Appleton, in Jataka Stories in Theravada Buddhism (2010), study how the stories teach about the path of a bodhisatta, a being on the way to Buddhahood.

Theravada Buddhists speak of ten paramis, or perfections. These are qualities a bodhisatta develops across many lives. They are generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness and equanimity. Mahayana texts list six or ten paramitas, overlapping but not identical.

The last ten Jatakas in the Pali collection, called the Mahanipata or great birth stories, are long and carefully told. Thai and other Theravada traditions match each of them with one perfection. Temuiya, the silent prince, shows renunciation. Mahajanaka, who swims for seven days, shows energy. Vessantara, the last, shows generosity.

These ten are hugely popular in Southeast Asia. They are painted in sequence on temple walls, acted in dance and puppet theater, and printed in picture books. Buddhists believe the future Buddha perfected each quality before his final life. The stories show those qualities at their highest pitch, which is part of why some are so hard to read.

Jataka no. 316, the Sasa Jataka, tells of four friends in a forest: a hare, a monkey, a jackal and an otter. They agree to give food on a holy day. The otter finds fish, the jackal finds meat and curd, and the monkey brings mangoes. The hare eats only grass. He has nothing a guest could eat.

So the hare resolves that if a guest comes, he will give his own body. Sakka, king of the gods in the story, disguises himself as a hungry brahmin to test him. The hare tells him to build a fire and leaps in. The fire does not burn him. Sakka reveals himself and paints the hare’s image on the moon, so all may see it.

Read closely, the story makes a claim about dana, giving. The gift that counts most is the one that costs the giver most. The hare is the Buddha, the identification says. Buddhists in Japan, China and elsewhere still point to the hare in the moon. Many readers find the story beautiful; some ask whether any gift should cost this much.

Jataka no. 407, the Mahakapi Jataka, tells of a monkey king who leads eighty thousand monkeys. They live in a great mango tree by the Ganges. A human king, the king of Benares, wants the mangoes and orders his archers to surround the tree at night. The monkeys are trapped.

The monkey king leaps across the river, ties a bamboo cane to his foot and leaps back, but the cane is too short. He grips a branch and makes his own body the last span. The troop runs across his back to safety. One monkey, who is jealous, jumps hard on his back and breaks it. The king of Benares sees it all.

Moved, the human king has the monkey lowered and cared for. Before he dies, the monkey king explains his choice: a ruler should seek the welfare of those he rules. The human king honors him with a royal funeral. The story is a political argument as well as a moral one: it shows a ruler who serves his people with his body.

Jataka no. 547 opens with a prince who loves to give. Vessantara gives away his kingdom’s white elephant, which brings rain. The people are furious, and he is banished with his wife Maddi and their two children, Jali and Kanhajina. On the road, he gives away his horses and chariot. The family settles in a mountain hermitage.

One day, while Maddi is out gathering food, an old brahmin named Jujaka arrives and asks for the children as servants. Vessantara gives them. The children hide in a pond and plead, but he gives them anyway. Then Sakka, disguised as a brahmin, asks for Maddi. Vessantara gives her too. Sakka at once returns her and blesses him.

In the end, the children are brought to their grandfather, the king, who ransoms them. Jujaka dies from overeating. The family is reunited and Vessantara is called home to rule. The earth shakes at each great gift, the story says. Buddhists tell it as the last life of the bodhisatta before his birth as Siddhattha.

The gift of the children has troubled readers from early on. The Questions of King Milinda, a Pali text from around the start of the common era, has the king ask the monk Nagasena whether Vessantara did wrong. Nagasena defends the gift as the act of a bodhisatta who sought awakening for the good of all. The question shows the debate is ancient.

Modern readers answer in several ways. Some Buddhist teachers stress that the story is about perfect non-attachment, not ordinary family life, and is not a model for parents. Some point out that the story itself lets Maddi and the children voice their grief, which takes the pain seriously. Scholars such as Steven Collins have argued the story is meant to be felt as hard.

In Thailand and Laos, many listeners weep at the children’s scenes and still honor Vessantara. Some women in the audience, ethnographers report, identify with Maddi. A few modern critics call the story harmful. A careful student reports these readings without choosing one. The goal is to understand how a community holds a hard story.

Bharhut is a site in central India where a great stupa once stood. Its stone railings and gateways, carved around the second century BCE, show many scenes. Some are Jatakas. Several carvings carry short inscriptions that name the story, which lets scholars match pictures to texts.

This matters for dating. If a Jataka is carved and named at Bharhut, a form of that story was known by then. Scholars use Bharhut and the similar site at Sanchi to show that Jataka telling is old. The carvings also show that some stories differed from the later written versions.

Most of the Bharhut railing is now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata. Visitors can see the relief carvings up close. Among them is a scene scholars identify as the Mahakapi Jataka: a monkey stretched across a river while others cross. The stone tells the story without words.

Borobudur, on the island of Java in Indonesia, is one of the largest Buddhist monuments in the world. It was built around the late eighth and early ninth centuries CE under the Sailendra dynasty. It rises in terraces, with walls of carved panels along the galleries.

Buddhist pilgrims walk around the monument clockwise, climbing level by level. As they walk, the panels tell stories: the Buddha’s life, Jatakas and avadanas, and scenes from Mahayana sutras such as the Gandavyuha. Scholars count about 1,460 narrative panels. The walk itself is a kind of reading.

Borobudur was restored with UNESCO’s help in the 1970s and named a World Heritage Site in 1991. Buddhists from Indonesia and abroad gather there for Vesak each year. The monument shows how Jataka tales traveled far from India and were retold in stone for new audiences.

The Tevijja Sutta is Digha Nikaya 13. Rhys Davids translated it in Sacred Books of the East 11 (1881), where he called it On Knowledge of the Vedas. Tevijja means one who knows the three Vedas, the sacred texts of the brahmins. The sutta is set near a village called Manasakata in the kingdom of Kosala.

Two young brahmins, Vasettha and Bharadvaja, are walking and arguing. Each says his own teacher’s path is the straight way to union with Brahma, the high god of brahmin teaching. They cannot settle it. They hear that the Buddha is staying nearby and decide to ask him.

Notice the setting. The questioners are not Buddhists. They come from another religious world with its own texts and teachers. The sutta shows the Buddha, as it presents him, engaging their question in their own terms. He does not begin by rejecting Brahma. He begins by asking questions of his own.

The Buddha asks Vasettha a series of questions. Has any brahmin learned in the Vedas seen Brahma face to face? No. Has any of their teachers, or their teachers’ teachers, back seven generations? No. Did the ancient seers who made the hymns claim to have seen him? No.

Then, the sutta says, their talk is like a string of blind men, each holding the one in front. The first does not see, the middle does not see, the last does not see. The Buddha adds more images. A man says he loves the most beautiful woman in the land but cannot say who she is. A man builds a ladder at a crossroads to climb to a mansion he has never seen.

These images test a claim by asking what it rests on. The sutta’s target is not the questioners’ sincerity. It is a way of knowing: repeating what one has never checked. Readers often connect this passage to the Kalama Sutta. Hindu readers have their own long tradition of answering such challenges, and the sutta gives only the Buddhist side of the exchange.

The Buddha does not leave the young men empty-handed. He asks what Brahma is like. They agree Brahma is free of possessions, free of anger and malice, pure and self-controlled. And the brahmins? They agree the brahmins are not. So how could those unlike Brahma join him?

Then the Buddha, as the sutta presents him, describes a monk who fills the world with love, then pity, then sympathetic joy, then equanimity, in every direction, without limit. Later tradition calls these the four brahmaviharas, the divine abidings. Such a person, the sutta says, is like Brahma and can be united with him after death.

Readers take this ending in different ways. Some see the Buddha using the brahmins’ own language to point to ethical practice. Some Theravada readers note that elsewhere these states lead to rebirth in Brahma worlds, not to nibbana. Scholars such as Richard Gombrich have argued the sutta plays on brahmin terms with care. The sutta reframes a question rather than simply rejecting it.

The Kalama Sutta is in the Anguttara Nikaya, at 3.65 in the usual numbering. Its Pali title is often given as the Kesamutti or Kesaputtiya Sutta, after the town of Kesaputta where the Kalama people lived. It is not in Rhys Davids’ SBE 11, so here it is paraphrased from later translations.

The Kalamas tell the Buddha their problem. Many teachers pass through town. Each praises his own teaching and attacks the others. The Kalamas are left in doubt: which of them speaks truth? It is a very modern-sounding problem, which is one reason the sutta is famous today.

The Buddha, as the sutta presents him, first says their doubt is reasonable. It is fitting to doubt, he says, when a matter is uncertain. This short line has become one of the most quoted in modern writing about Buddhism. The next lesson shows what he tells them to do with their doubt.

The Buddha then lists grounds that, on their own, are not enough. Do not go by repeated hearing, by tradition, by rumor, or by a collection of scriptures. Do not go by logic alone, by inference, by reasoning from appearances, or by agreement with a view one already holds. Do not go by a speaker’s seeming ability, or because ’this monk is our teacher.’

Instead, the sutta says, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome, blameworthy, criticized by the wise, and lead to harm and suffering when practiced, abandon them. When you know that things are wholesome and lead to welfare and happiness, take them up. The test is their results in life, checked with the wise.

The Buddha then walks the Kalamas through greed, hatred and delusion. Do these lead to harm? Yes, they agree. And their opposites lead to welfare. So the sutta ends with the Kalamas reaching conclusions the Buddha shares, and taking refuge. The method is inquiry, but it is guided inquiry, with a clear direction.

In the twentieth century, the Kalama Sutta became famous as Buddhism’s charter of free inquiry. Books and posters quoted it as saying: believe nothing unless it agrees with your own reason. Some versions circulated online add words the sutta does not contain. This popular reading fits a modern ideal of independent thinking.

Buddhist teachers have pushed back. Bhikkhu Bodhi, in the essay A Look at the Kalama Sutta (1988), notes that the sutta was given to people who were not yet followers, about how to begin. It does not reject faith or the teacher; it gives a starting test and then leads to shared conclusions. Thanissaro Bhikkhu makes a similar point: the test includes the judgment of the wise.

A careful reader holds both. The sutta does invite personal testing, and many Buddhists find that freeing. It also frames that testing within the wise, within ethics, and within a path. Over-reading happens when one line is cut from its setting. It is the same danger close reading guards against in the Dhammapada.

The parable of the raft appears in the Alagaddupama Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 22, the discourse on the simile of the snake. A man on a journey comes to a great river. The near shore is dangerous. The far shore is safe. There is no boat or bridge. So he gathers grass, sticks and branches and binds them into a raft.

He crosses safely. Then, the Buddha asks, should he lift the raft onto his head and carry it wherever he goes, because it was so useful? The monks answer no. He should leave it on the shore. In the same way, the Buddha says, the teaching is like a raft: for crossing over, not for grasping.

The sutta adds a striking line: the monks should let go even of good teachings, how much more of bad ones. The same sutta warns that grasping a teaching wrongly is like grabbing a snake by the tail. The two images work together. Hold the teaching rightly, and use it for what it is for.

Theravada teachers usually read the raft within its sutta. The monks in the story had been misusing teachings to argue or to defend wrong views. The raft reminds them that teachings have a purpose: to reach freedom from suffering. It does not mean teachings are unimportant while one is still crossing.

Mahayana and Zen writers often use the raft more widely. The Diamond Sutra, a Mahayana text, says the teachings should be abandoned like a raft. Zen teachers use related images, such as the finger pointing at the moon: do not mistake the finger for the moon. For them, the raft supports an approach that holds words lightly.

Modern readers sometimes use the raft to argue that any religious practice may be dropped once it feels unneeded. Many teachers across schools reply that the man in the parable is on the far shore when he sets down the raft, not in the middle of the river. The image depends on timing.

The Pali texts list ten questions the Buddha, as they present him, set aside. Is the world eternal, or not? Is it infinite, or not? Is the soul the same as the body, or different? Does a Buddha exist after death, not exist, both, or neither? Scholars call these the unanswered questions, avyakata in Pali, meaning undeclared.

The Buddha did not say these questions were foolish. The suttas say he did not declare answers because answering would not lead to calm, insight or nibbana. In some suttas, such as Majjhima Nikaya 72, he explains that none of the four options fits a Buddha after death, as a fire gone out cannot be said to go north or south.

Readers explain the silence in several ways. Some say it is practical: answers would not help. Some say the questions are badly framed, using terms that do not apply. Some philosophers compare it to modern debates about questions that have no answer. The suttas give reasons of both kinds.

The poisoned arrow is told in the Cula-Malunkya Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 63. Malunkyaputta threatens to leave unless his questions are answered. The Buddha, as the sutta presents him, tells the story of the wounded man who will not be treated until he knows every detail about the archer and the bow.

The Buddha then says what he has declared: suffering, its origin, its cessation and the path. Why these? Because they are connected with the goal and lead to peace. The others are set aside because they do not. So the sutta ties back to the first sermon’s four truths. The four truths are the surgeon’s work.

Readers point out that the parable does not forbid thinking about big questions. Buddhist philosophers have debated many of them for centuries. What the parable ranks is urgency: first remove the arrow. Inquiry within the tradition, on this reading, has a priority order, and suffering comes first.