page_title: Buddhist mythology
section_title: The extended life of the Buddha in Jātakas
hierarchical_section_title: Buddhist mythology / The myth of the Buddha's life / The extended life of the Buddha in Jātakas
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Vessantara deelt aalzoezen uit.
context_page_description: The Buddhist traditions have created and maintained a vast body of mythological literature. The central myth of Buddhism is the life of the Buddha. This is told in relatively realistic terms in the earliest texts, and was soon elaborated into a complex literary mythology. The chief motif of this story, and the most distinctive feature of Buddhist myth, is the Buddha's renunciation: leaving his home and family for a spiritual quest. Alongside this central myth, the traditions contain large numbers of smaller stories, which are usually supposed to convey an ethical or Buddhist teaching. These include the popular Jātakas, folk tales or legends believed to be past lives of Gautama Buddha. Since these are regarded as episodes in the life of the Buddha, they are treated here as “myth”, rather than distinguishing between myth, legend, and folk-tale.
  Buddhist mythology is maintained in texts, but these have always existed alongside oral traditions of storytelling, as well as creative retellings of myths as drama or artworks. This creative mythology continues to this day, and includes film, television, and musical adaptions of Buddhist myths.
context_section_description: One of the “three knowledges” (tevijjā) of the Buddha was recollecting past lives. However, early texts contain very few actual narratives of past lives. Such stories as are found in the early texts almost always show signs of belonging to the latest strata of those texts. However, in a short time the Buddhist community developed a vast repertoire of stories associated with the Buddha's past lives, known as the Jātakas. There are 550 such stories in the Pali canon, and hundreds more in Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit sources. Several Jātakas are depicted in visual form on the monuments at Sanchi, dating around the 1st century BCE. The corpus of Jātaka stories continued to grow over the centuries. Some of the most popular continue to be the Mahanipata Jataka which depict the final ten lives of the Buddha before his last birth.
  The Jātakas appear to be mostly derived from vernacular Indian folk tales, fables and legends in mixed prose and verse. Like the lives of the Buddha, they are not sectarian, as many Jātakas are shared among traditions. Some of the stories are related to Brahmanical legends, such as those found in the Rāmayaṇa and Mahābharata, while others show similarities to Aesop's fables and other world literature. While most of the Jātakas contain a “moral”, in most cases these pertain to simple and universal ideas, such as non-violence or honesty, and only a few of the stories feature distinctively Buddhist ideas. A typical Jātaka tale features a conflict or challenge, which the hero overcomes through his courage, intelligence, or other virtues. The hero of the story is identified with the Buddha, while other characters in the story are often identified with familiar associates of the Buddha, such as his close disciples, family, or Devadatta as the antagonist.
  Since the Jātakas are in essence the preliminary chapters of the Buddha's spiritual development, they are sometimes included together with the Buddha's life. In the Pali sources, for example, the life of the Buddha is featured as the opening framing narrative of the Jātaka collection.
  There is a similar class of literature known as Apadāna. Originally the term seems to have simply meant a tale of the past, as the Mahāpadāna Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya tells the story of a Buddha in a past age. However it came to refer to a class of stories about the past lives of the Buddha's monk and nun disciples. These often depict how enlightened disciples of the Buddha achieved that status by making offerings to a Buddha in a past life.
caption: Vessantara gives alms, from one of the most famous Jatakas, the Vessantara Jataka
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