In this ground-breaking book, Naomi Appleton takes a genre-oriented approach to narratives prominent in the Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, focusing on jâtaka tales, which recount the many lives and reincarnations of the Buddha. Deriving from oral tradition, the narratives have been recorded for centuries in manuscript form, yet continue to circulate through folk and popular culture. They are ubiquitous in murals on temple walls, and appear in children’s books, television shows, festival enactments, and as parables in sermons. These lives of bodhisattas (buddhas-to-be) are generally didactic and illustrate the lessons necessary along the slow road to enlightenment.
Previous studies, both scholarly and semi-scholarly, have focused upon the translation and/or loose retelling of individual tales, and upon thematic analysis. Appleton’s work, in contrast, treats the entire corpus of jâtakas as a genre. The author is keenly interested in viewing the narratives as part of a complex system involving practitioners and Buddhism as a whole, yielding a view of folk literature as something dynamic, never static. The author characterizes the jâtaka genre as “diverse and changing” (13). Major foci in the book include shifts over time in definition and criteria for inclusion as a jâtaka; the relationship of jâtakas to other narratives, including other forms of biography; their place in the historical development of Buddhist doctrine; and attitudes and practices associated with the narratives today. The author works primarily with a Pali-language canonical text, the Jatakatthavannana, referred to as JA. Though treating jâtakas as associated with Theravâda Buddhism in general, the book emphasizes Sri Lanka and, to a lesser extent, Thailand. Sri Lanka is the historical home of Theravâda Buddhism, one of two main sects in Buddhism.
This is a book of intricate scholarship, based on deep familiarity with textual materials in their original languages, most notably Pali, Sanskrit, and Sinhalese. The author is recently trained and describes how jâtaka narratives have been her passionate focus since her undergraduate education. This study is a testament to the challenge of working with original texts from the region and time periods involved here. True expertise is required and takes years to develop.
The early chapters of the book take up basic questions relevant to understanding the corpus, asking for example, what exactly is a jâtaka? The standard description—“tales of the past lives of the Buddha”—is too simple. Yet throughout the book, the author also steers towards issues that are relevant beyond the specific study of jâtakas, such as the nature of biography, especially sacred biography, and the comparison of Mahâyâna and Theravâda Buddhism. Ultimately, the book asks what this body of narrative, and the attitudes and practices associated with it, tell us about Buddhism. What is the “work” of jâtaka narratives within Buddhism? Rather than brushing them off as “mere folklore” as, astoundingly, previous authors have, Appleton rightly raises jâtakas to a central and significant place in Buddhism and in the experiences of practitioners.
Perhaps due to the genre-oriented, whole-corpus approach of the study, and to its long historical view, the work glances only slightly at contemporary interactions with the texts. This seems at odds with the author’s goal of placing jâtakas in social context. The penultimate chapter takes up the veneration of jâtaka texts, and draws insightfully upon art historical analyses of attitudes towards sculptural Buddha images. Jâtakas are simultaneously didactic and sacred, a tension Appleton wrestles to unravel. The focus of the chapter is on the symbolic qualities and ideology of the genre. The short final chapter, “The perfection of storytelling,” briefly addresses jâtakas in ethnographic settings where they are performed or referenced, especially the important Buddhist celebration, Vesak. The chapter argues that Buddha, Bodhisattas, and Buddhists interact by engaging the Buddha’s life as an exemplary biography. Doctrine and practice are in dynamic interplay.
How participants encounter, experience, hear, and perform jâtaka stories receives some attention here, but is generally one step removed from actual people. This will give pause to folklorists. The voices of Theravâda Buddhists today are nearly absent, save for a few anecdotes from the author’s experiences in Sri Lanka. Performance- or event-centered analysis is simply not a goal of this book, but one can imagine how later works, either by Appleton or others, might fill this gap. When Appleton does share first-hand experiences from Sri Lanka, for example her humorous doubts about the date of a manuscript in a Kandy temple, the material comes to life refreshingly.
This book will be most suitable for reading by advanced undergraduates or serious researchers interested specifically in Theravâda Buddhism and/or Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Though the key questions and arguments are always stated clearly, this is not a reader-friendly introduction to the texts and practices of Buddhism. Because the genre is treated as a whole, individual tales are scarcely mentioned, even as examples. A couple flaws are probably the fault of the publisher, not the author, perhaps due to cost concerns: there are no illustrations and, inconveniently, there is no glossary, which even readers with some background in Theravâda cultures would find useful. Vocabulary in Pali, the ancient language of Buddhist scripture, is necessarily abundant throughout the book, yet not all Pali terms are translated at first use or at least frequently enough for readers to absorb.
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[Review length: 869 words • Review posted on December 5, 2011]