Garland of the Buddha's Past Lives (Volume 2). Aryashura

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Garland of the Buddha's Past Lives (Volume 2) - Aryashura


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convert the wicked to become good. Taking the Bodhi·sattva’s self-sacrificial actions as a paradigm, as portrayed for example in ‘The Birth-Story of the Great Monkey’ (27), the righteous king should be a model of moral conduct for his _____________

      people and practice a virtue based on compassion and non-violence, protecting his society and sacrificing himself for his subjects.

      Neither power, treasury nor good policy

      can bring a king to the same position

      as he can reach through the path of virtue,

      however great his effort or expenses. (22.151 [94])

      The reader may well ask whether such an ideal is really possible. Can a king really give up violence and be a paradigm of compassion if he is to maintain power? One way of tackling this matter is to take an alternative approach from simply reading the text in terms of providing straight-forward didactic messages. As Steven Collins has argued (1998: 414ff), the tension between the ideal and the actual is inherent in the very nature of a renunciate ideology, ________

      particularly an ideology expressed through the normative medium of texts. Seeking both to transcend and inform the ordinary world, Buddhist renunciate values are, by necessity, engaged in a constantly oscillating dialectic with human society and kingship, involving both conflict and resolution. Given the inherent complexity of this relationship, while various Buddhist texts do espouse the notion of a non-violent, compassionate king, one need not necessarily take such statements solely at face value. Rather than treating such passages simply as offering genuine alternatives to kingship, one can, as Collins suggests, also view them as (often ironical) comments on actual kingship made from an ideological remove.

      The “Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives” expresses a similar ambiguity regarding the Bodhi·sattva’s virtue in general. In ‘The Birth-Story of the Great Monkey’ (27), the Bodhi·sattva’s self-sacrifice for a community of monkeys is portrayed as a model of virtue to be followed by the king witnessing the event. Elsewhere, however, the text is at pains to stress the miraculous nature of the Bodhi·sattva’s unique feats of virtue, asserting that they are “unable to be imitated” by others (Volume 1, preface, v.4). A paragon of virtue, the Bodhi·sattva thus acts both as an ultimate moral standard that shapes and informs the ordinary world and as a transcendent ideal whose exceptional and superior quality serves to inspire the intense devotion that lies at the heart of Arya·shura’s work.

      The Sanskrit Text

      For stories 21–34 I have used Heinrich Kern’s edition (1891) as a base text, which I have then emended by referring to manuscript readings provided by Peter Khoroche in his “Towards a New Edition of Arya-Sura’s Jatakamala” (1987). I have particularly followed the readings of the earlier manuscripts N and T For stories 33 and 34, I have benefited greatly from the text-critical comments of Michael Hahn (2001). A list of all emendations made can be found at the end of the volume.

      I am very grateful to Andrew Skilton for his helpful comments on the introduction and translation.

      Notes

      Another notable story in which enmity is overcome by friendship is ‘The Birth-Story of the Goose’ (22), in which a hunter’s aggressive intentions toward a flock of geese cease when he witnesses the devotion shown by a goose for his king (see especially 22.112 [65]). Here the king who ordered the capture of the geese is so impressed by the friendship shown by the pair of geese that he proclaims his own friendship for them (22.144 [88]): “May this friendship never be severed now that it has been embarked upon. Place your trust in me. For a union of noble beings never decays.”

      their noticeably short length, neither story contains a description of the forest or a depiction of a clash between animals and humans, both of which are prominent themes in the other animal stories.


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