Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/93

Rh occupies two hundred and fifty pages octavo, and consists of a very large number (I have not counted them, and there is no index, but I should think they amount to more than one hundred and fifty) of most entertaining anecdotes. Although therefore the Birth Stories are spoken of as 'The five hundred and fifty Jātakas,' this is merely a round number reached by an entirely artificial arrangement, and gives no clue to the actual number of stories. It is probable that our present collection contains altogether (including the Introductory Stories where they are not mere repetitions) between two and three thousand independent tales, fables, anecdotes, and riddles.

Nor is the number 550 any more exact (though the discrepancy in this case is not so great) if it be supposed to record, not the number of stories, but the number of distinct births of the Bodisat. In the Kulāvaka Jātaka, just referred to (the tale On Mercy to Animals), there are two consecutive births of the future Buddha; and on the other hand, none of the six Jātakas mentioned in note 1, p. lxxx, represents a distinct birth at all — the Bodisat is in them the same person as he is in the later Jātakas in which those six are contained.

From the facts as they stand it seems at present to