The Jātaka Tales
Five hundred and forty-seven accounts of the Buddha's earlier lives, in which he appears as a hare, a monkey king, a merchant, a deer that offers itself in place of a pregnant doe, a prince who gives away everything he is asked for. Each begins with an occasion in the Buddha's ministry, tells the past life that explains it, and ends by naming who in the old story is who in the present one. Preserved in the same division of the Pali canon as the Dhammapada and carried by Buddhist missions across Asia, where the stories entered local repertoires and were cut into temple stone.
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Closest analogues
- 45% · 11 shared
- 45% · 9 shared
- 43% · 10 shared
- 43% · 10 shared
- 43% · 10 shared
- 40% · 11 shared