Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

PALI TEXT SOCIETY – GENERAL EDITORSHIP E.B. COWELL – SIX VOLUMES - THREE BOOKS

VOLUME I – TRANSLATION ROBERT CHALMERS, B.S. – 1895 – LAST REPRINT 2013

VOLUME II – TRANSLATION W.H.D. ROUSE, M.A. – 1895 – LAST REPRINT 2013

VOLUME III – TRANSLATION H.T. FRANCIS, M.A. & R.A. NEIL, M.A. – 1895 – LAST REPRINT 2005

VOLUME IV – TRANSLATION W.H.D. ROUSE, M.A. – 1895 – LAST REPRINT 2005

VOLUME V – TRANSLATION H.T. FRANCIS, M.A. – 1895 – LAST REPRINT 2005

VOLUME VI – TRANSLATION E.B. COWELL, M.A. & W.H.D. ROUSE, M.A., LITT.D. – 1907 – LAST REPRINT 2005

This is a general assessment for the whole collection. You can get the three volumes separately on Amazon, but you can get the three volumes in one operation from the Pali Text Society that is clearly identified and described on the Internet.

These 547 stories are essential in Buddhism, particularly in Theravada Buddhism. They are the 547 lives of Buddha before his last birth and life when he reached nibbana (nirvana in Sanskrit). You can then take them as stories and read them as literature. The fact that they are attributed to Buddha himself who would have told them is purely anecdotic and secondary, and by the way either fictional or the revelation of a great literary imagination in Buddha himself. They are varied and all of them very interesting. They often go long before and beyond Buddha himself and have deep roots in Indian religious traditions of old forms of Hinduism.

But these stories were originally written in Pali, which means they had been transcribed into Pali long after the death of Buddha himself since Pali was a language devised to transcribe the canonical preaching of Buddha in the Theravada tradition four or five centuries after his death. We must understand the great advantage of Pali for the spreading of Buddha’s teachings: Pali does not have a writing system of its own and it can be transcribed with any writing system available in the Indian subcontinent and in South East Asia, provided these writing systems are based on the phonetics of the language, hence is alphabetical based on phonemes, though some maybe syllabic writing systems which is secondary since then they have diacritic signs or single vocalic signs for the various vowels to change the basic vowel that is attached to the consonant of the syllable.

These stories have become very popular and are the objects of a lot of interest, with festivals, recitations, readings, theatrical performances, illustrations of many types. Among these 547 lives the last ten are emphasized more than the others because they are closer to Buddha’s last enlightened life. They should be studied from a Buddhist point of view with one question in mind: what prevented Buddha from reaching nibbana in every single of these lives? This is typical of the last one in which Prince Vessantara who is the embodiment of the future Buddha is pushing the desire to give so far that he gives away the elephant which is considered by the people of his community as the national symbol of the kingdom where he lives. But even worse: when he is banned from his community he goes as far as giving his own children into slavery to a Brahman and his wife as a concubine to a god disguised as a Brahman. Obviously here he demonstrates his obsessive compulsive disorder that is simply called “tanha” in Pali, excessive attachment, and that is part of his merit, but a negative part. He has to become detached from even this desire to be detached from all possessions and understand that children, spouse and quite a few other things are not private possessions you can give away.

This reading is still missing in many ways.

In the same way these stories give life to many divine beings and gods or goddesses and that goes against Buddhist teaching: Buddha refused to commit his life and mental consciousness to any divine creature or creator because such gods explained no mystery in life but only replaced one with another. In the same way this rejection of any divine creation of the world and humanity enabled Buddha to reject the caste system that is based on each caste being created from one part of the divine body of Brahma himself, the Dalits, the untouchables being created from no part of the divine body at all, hence not being human beings, hence being nothing but animals. The recent case of human sacrifice of a ten year old child in Nepal in a Dalit community shows how far their rejection out of humanity can go in the negation of basic human rights and dignity and the internalization of this negation in the victims themselves. We are here living a permanent trauma in a community and that trauma creates a Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that can easily become murderous or criminal. Buddha is the negation of this system by his negation of the existence of gods and even the concept of god.

These volumes are superbly precious in the way they are built. First each volume has a long and very detailed table of contents identifying each jataka. Then the last book has a long and detailed general index. But the main advantage is in the body of each story. A rich corpus of notes in each story gives the various variants of the jatakas, and important linguistic remarks about the Pali original terms used in the original jataka, which enables us to verify the translation. The translation itself is an old translation when the theory was that you had to find an “equivalent” in English of each Pali phrase. The equivalent was then typical of English culture and conveyed an English interpretation, hence at times moving the text from one meaning to another. These notes thus restore some authenticity since we can go back to the Pali concepts that have at times very little to do with English. I used the concept of “tanha” in this review with the meaning of “obsessive compulsive disorder” and with the traditional rendering of “excessive attachment.” It is obvious the concept of OCD could not be used in these translations since it is a modern concept and in the older period we are speaking of (more than one century ago) even the concept of excessive attachment was not used for “tanha” which was only understood as “attachment” which transfers the negative dimension of “tanha” from the attachment itself to what this attachment is attached to, hence the object of the attachment. That is the very germ of ascetism that Buddha rejects: to be detached from food, let’s get rid of food altogether.

My last remark is about the verses that are integrated in the jatakas and that are translated in versified verses in these translations. It is where I miss the original text most to verify the versification of the original because the versification itself is meaning something with the focalization on and topicalization of some elements by the linguistic form itself and that cannot be kept in English. But the original can be found on the Internet though it is rather hard to find it in Latin transcription since the original Pali versions are for southern and south-eastern Asian communities, hence in the writing systems they commonly practice.

This set of three books bringing together the six volumes two by two is a great tool for the discovery of this Buddhist culture that is too often only seen through the glasses of Tibetan Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism is for me a lot more human because it does not believe in the transmigration of the perfect enlightened Buddha, or whoever, beyond his or her enlightenment. In other words the concept of Dalai Lama is in full contradiction with the concept of nibbana that is central in Buddhism in general and in Theravada Buddhism in particular since enlightenment, or nibbana, takes the enlightened Buddha out of the cycle of dukkha, of birth-life/decay-death-rebirth, hence liberate the enlightened Buddha of the fate of being reborn.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU