Birth Stories By Lynn Cianfarani

Early World Literature 4 VIRTUE / Page 4.2 The Buddha’s Birth Stories On this page: 0 of 2 attempted (0%) | 0 of 2 correct (0%)

The Buddha’s Birth Stories By Lynn Cianfarani

The exterior of the Ajanta Caves where they were cut into the stone on the side of a cliff by the Waghur River in India. These cave monuments, which date from the second century

BCE to about 480 or 650 CE, house depictions of Buddha and the Jātaka Tales. Photo courtesy of Shriram Rajagopalan / Flickr Creative Commons

In one of his former lives, Buddha was born a pigeon. That is, at least, how it is recounted in “The Pigeon and the Crow,” one of the 547 stories in the Jātaka Tales, a classic work of Buddhist literature.

Each of the Jātaka Tales offers readers a moral. The pigeon story, for instance, highlights the dangers of greed. But the stories are more than just fables. They are sacred Buddhist lore, outlining the lives that Buddha passed through before his birth as Prince Siddhartha. Jātaka literally means “story of birth,” and in the stories, Buddha (referred to in the Tales as the Bodhisatta—“one seeking enlightenment”) is born and

reborn in the form of animals, humans, and super-human beings, all the while striving toward enlightenment.

For Buddhists, the concept of past lives is hallowed. According to Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, “Buddhists see the continuum of lives of all beings as a commonsense fact, not a mystical belief.”1 Buddhist faith teaches that ordinary humans do not remember past existences, but enlightened beings have the gift of recalling their former lives in detail.2

Buddhists who hear the Jātaka Tales do not necessarily take them as a word-for-word accounting of past events, however. Devdutt Pattanaik, a Mumbai-based speaker, writer, and mythology specialist, says that the Jātaka Tales “are as real and historical to Buddhists as the stories of Christ’s resurrection are to Christians.”3 For most Buddhists, whether Buddha actually lived as a pigeon is not the issue; what matters is that Buddha did indeed have past existences which lessons can be learned from.

Reliable historical details of Buddha’s life—his early years as Siddhartha Gutam, and later, as the enlightened Buddha—are hard to come by. According to W.S. Merwin, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, we don’t know how much of the Buddha/Siddhartha story “is pure fairy tale, and how much of it is historic fact.”4 As with most religions, it’s the message that guides followers.

Most scholars do accept that Siddhartha Gutam was an actual man, born to a royal family in India in 563 BCE. The factual events of his life, however, remain open to debate. According to Buddhist texts, Siddhartha married and had a child, but became disillusioned with palace life. He started to make trips outside the palace and grew distraught when he saw sickness, old age, and death.

In hopes of figuring out a way to end people’s suffering, Siddhartha left his family and his palace. For several years, Buddhist tradition holds, Siddhartha practiced asceticism. He sat in meditation and ate little; sometimes he ate nothing. Enduring hardship, however, only weakened him and offered little spiritual insight. Overdoing things, Siddhartha realized, was not the key to happiness. Siddhartha committed himself to the middle way, the path between extreme sacrifice and self-indulgence.

Legend has it that after giving up his ascetic lifestyle, Siddhartha sat under a Bodhi tree (a type of fig tree) for deep meditation, vowing not to leave until he reached a state of enlightenment. After several weeks of intense meditation he had gained a supreme wisdom—a mental clarity that included details of his past lives—and Siddhartha, at last, understood things as they truly are. He thus became, Buddhists posit, the Buddha, or “The Awakened One.” Today, the image of the Buddha meditating under a tree is as symbolic to Buddhists as the image of Christ nailed to the cross is to Christians.

After reaching enlightenment, Buddha shared his new wisdom with five holy men. They became his disciples, marking the beginning of the Buddhist community. For more than 40 years, Buddha and his disciples wandered throughout India spreading his teachings. The Jātaka Tales, of course, were part of these teachings.

Buddha’s birth stories moved beyond India, too, traveling via caravan routes and eventually influencing other cultures. According to archaeological and literary evidence the Jātaka stories were not compiled as text until somewhere between the 3rd century BCE and the 5th century CE.5 Written by multiple anonymous authors in a combination of prose and verse, the stories are included as part of the Buddhist canon, and continue to be part of Buddhist teachings. Each year, the Dalai Lama himself greets followers for a Jātaka Tales reading. In February 2013, thousands showed up in Dharasalama, India to hear him recite tale 29, “A Visitor from Brahmaloka,” a story of how a king overcomes his wrong views and develops humility.6