The Jatakas as a Historical Source

The Jatakas are stories about the Buddha’s earlier births. They look like religious tales. Yet historians use them to see how ordinary people lived in ancient India.

1.1 What is a Jataka, and why does it matter to a historian?

A Jataka is a “birth story”. In each one, the Buddha-to-be is born again and again, as a king, a merchant, a peacock or a deer. At the end, the Buddha links the old tale to a lesson for his own day.

The tales are full of everyday things. They mention markets, guilds, roads, villages and ships. A historian reads these side details, not the moral.

1.2 Are the stories Buddhist or older?

Rhys Davids called most of the tales older folklore. There is “nothing peculiarly Buddhist” in them. What is Buddhist is only the choice of which tales to keep. So the stories carry village memory from before the Buddha’s teaching spread.

1.3 What language are they in, and how were they kept?

The Jataka Book is in Pali. The oldest part is the verses. The prose that explains each verse is a commentary. We do not know its date. Rhys Davids thought it was probably written about the fifth century CE, as no such commentaries are known before then.

So the verses are older than the prose. Be careful when you date any detail.

CDS II 2018, General Knowledge, Q56

The story Gandatindu Jataka was written in which language?

(a) Sanskrit
(b) Telugu
(c) Tamil
(d) Pali

The answer is (d) Pali. The Jataka Book is in Pali, the language of the early Buddhist texts.

2.1 What is a guild, and how many did the Jatakas know?

A guild is a trade group. Its members follow one craft and obey shared rules. The Pali word is seni.

Texts of the period speak of guilds of workers. The number is often given as eighteen. Rhys Davids names only four of them. He adds that a full list of all eighteen has not been found.

So “about eighteen guilds” is a safe line. A fixed list of eighteen is not.

2.2 Which crafts had guilds?

Rhys Davids lists the main crafts of the time. They are workers in wood, metal and stone, weavers, leather workers, potters, ivory workers, dyers and jewellers. Barbers, garland-makers and sailors also had their own groups.

He is careful with some of them. For hunters and cooks he says it is doubtful that they formed guilds.

2.3 Who led a guild?

The head of a guild was called a jetthaka. Some texts use pamukha for the same post. Both words mean “chief” or “foremost”. Rhys Davids calls such men aldermen, or presidents.

They were sometimes wealthy and favoured at court. The Pali Text Society dictionary gives jetthaka as “head of the silversmith’s guild” in one Jataka passage.

The jetthaka is not the same as the setthi. A setthi is a treasurer or banker. This is a common exam trap.

2.4 What powers did guilds have?

Guilds could judge quarrels between their own members. Disputes between one guild and another went to the mahasetthi, the chief treasurer. Rhys Davids adds that the king called the people together through their guilds on big occasions.

So a guild was more than a shop. It was a small court and a voice for its trade.

2.5 What does the Jataka world say about villages and kings?

Rhys Davids describes the Ganges plain of the sixth century BCE. There were no big landlords. Most people were peasants with land of their own, or craftsmen. They were ruled by local headmen of their own choosing.

Kings ruled some regions, and tribal republics ruled others. In Kosala, even ordinary clansmen were called rajano, or “kings”. So power was spread wide.

3.1 What is the Baveru Jataka about?

Merchants sailed to the land of Baveru, which scholars link to Babylon. They took a crow with them. The people there had never seen a bird, so they paid a hundred coins for it. They gave it a golden cage and fine food.

On a later voyage the merchants brought a peacock. The people paid a thousand coins for it. Nobody cared about the crow after that. It flew to a rubbish heap.

The Buddha used the tale to say that false teachers lose honour once a true teacher appears.

3.2 What does the tale tell us about trade?

Rhys Davids notes that this is the only Jataka trading trip to Babylon (Baveru). The journey was by sea, but the port of departure is not named.

He treats it as a hint of long sea trade, not as proof of a regular route. Use it that way.

3.3 What is the Cullaka-Setthi Jataka about?

A wise treasurer saw a dead mouse on the road. He read the stars and said a clever young man could start a business with it. A poor young man heard him. He sold the mouse for a farthing to a tavern, as food for their cat.

He then turned that farthing, step by step, into more. He bought molasses and traded it for flowers. He cleared storm-broken branches and sold them as fuel to the king’s potter.

He supplied grass to a horse dealer. With a ship’s cargo bought on credit, he earned 200,000 pieces in four months.

The treasurer married his daughter to him. At the treasurer’s death, the young man became treasurer in that city.

3.4 What can a historian learn from it?

The tale shows that a person could rise through trade, not only by birth. It also shows the town economy in miniature. There were gardeners, potters, grass-cutters, horse dealers and ship traders.

Remember that it is a story. A real person did not necessarily earn money this way. The value is in the setting.

4.1 What is the Bharhut stupa?

Bharhut is a Buddhist stupa, a relic mound, in Madhya Pradesh. Its stone railings were carved in the Shunga period, around the mid-2nd century BCE. Most of what survives is now in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.

Some railing medallions and the coping show Jataka stories. The carvings are labelled. The Buddha is shown only by symbols, such as a wheel or an empty throne.

4.2 Why do the carved labels matter?

The labels give the name of the Jataka beside the scene. That fixes which story the sculptor meant. Rhys Davids reported that 27 scenes from Bharhut and Sanchi matched passages in the existing Jataka Book. Twenty-three scenes were still unidentified.

So the stories were known in stone long before the prose commentary was written down.

4.3 How should you read the evidence?

Put the three kinds of evidence side by side. The verses are early. The carvings show the stories were known by the 2nd century BCE. The prose commentary is later.

For dating, give a range and the reason. Do not give one year as if it were certain.