Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/43

 Presidential Address. 15

repetitions, " If this story were not confined to a thousand verses, it would never come to an end." This principle of arrangement, if we may use the word principle of a thing so meaningless, well shows that perversion of the sense of symmetry which afflicted the scholars of the east. Each of the stories is composed on one plan. It begins with what is called the story of the present, or the occasion. Something happens ; the Brethren, who always find time for gossip, although gossip is one of the sins condemned most severely by their Northern cousins, meet together in the Hall of Truth, and talk the matter over. In comes the Buddha, and asks what they are talking about : they tell him. " Oh," says he, "that need not surprise you ; the same thing has happened before." Then he tells them the Story of the Past, in which the main circumstances are the same, and so are the characters, but under different names ; Buddha is nearly always one of them. In the course of the story he introduces the text-verses, which in the later books paraphrase the whole. Finally he draws the moral, and identifies the characters of the Birth with those around him.

Of late years, the study of Buddhist Sanskrit has brought to light some other collections of Birth Stories, which are invaluable for comparative criticism. One is called the Jdtaka-Mdld, or Garland of Births.^ This book contains 34 stories, of which 26 have been identified with stories or titles in the Pali Jdtaka Book. The others are shorter, and differ in many respects from those of the Pdli. A story-book of an independent type, and far more important, is the Divydvaddna} edited from Nepalese MSS. This belongs to the Northern School of

^Th& Jdtaka-Mdla, edited by H. Kern. American Oriental Series. Ginn & Co. 1891.

^ The Divydvaddna, a collection of early Buddhist legends, now first edited from the MSS. by E. B. Cowell and R. A. Neil. Cambridge. 1886.