Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/41

 Presidential Address, 13

religious teachers, in fact, he used for his own purposes the materials which he found at hand, knowing that truth embodied in a tale could find entry at lowly- doors. There is no contemporary evidence ; but the traditions of Ceylon speak of the Jdtaka as existing at the time of the Council of Vesali, which took place a round hundred years after Buddha's death, that is about 380 B.C.^ More important still is the direct evidence of the Buddhist carvings on the shrines of Bharhut, Sanchi, and Amaravati. Here are a number of scenes from the Jdtakas, each inscribed with its title, and most of them represented in the Jdtaka Book. Thus at the end of the third century B.C., or some 300 years after the death of Buddha, these stories were already considered sacred, and their scenes were felt to be the most fit ornament to be carved on a great Buddhist shrine. There is evidence also, not only in the Pali sacred books, but in those of the hostile sect of the Northern Buddhists, that a collection, of Birth stories under the title oi Jdtaka existed as part of the canon. All this points to the existence of such a book in very early times, probably before the split took place between Northern and Southern Buddhism. A strong confirmation of this is the reference in one Birth Story to Ceylon as an isle of yakkkas, or goblins.

But the book as we have it was put together much later. According to the Ceylon tradition, the book originally consisted only of the gdthds or poetical stanzas, the stories being given in a Singhalese com- mentary ; and that this commentary was translated into Pali by the scholar Buddhaghosa about 430 A.D. Probably the verses were learnt by heart as the text for stories handed down by oral tradition or otherwise ; there might well have been an ancient text, but the differences in detail between the Pali and the various Sanskrit

^ Dipavanisa, 5, 32.