Nalini Balbir
University of Paris-3, Sorbonne-Nouvelle and l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris
Jainism, a trend of thought born in Magadha and evidenced from at least the 5th cent. BCE, shares a lot of common features with early Buddhism. Among them is the use of narratives as a vehicle for teaching in all types of circumstances and contexts which is a full fledged identified component in the discourse of their teachers Buddha and Mahāvīra.
The Jain story tellers, whose works are available in written form from the 5th cent. CE onwards, in commentaries on the scriptures, as independent narratives or as narratives embedded in larger epics or novels, draw upon a large variety of sources. Thus, very often, the contents of the stories have nothing “Jain” in themselves and also appear in “Buddhist” or “Hindu” environments. We therefore feel authorized to comparative studies where both the common motives and the elements of contextualisation and performance can be investigated.
The present paper will try to survey the genres of Buddhist and Jain narratives as evidenced in Prakrit, Sanskrit and Pāli sources, and to investigate the questions raised by their comparison with the help of as many examples as possible. In particular, we will focus on parables and exempla, on animal fables. We will also examine Jain attitudes toward the epic material (Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata and Purāṇas) which was part of their cultural environment but which was not readily accepted by them as an unquestionable package. It led some of their leading teachers both to satirical compositions and conscious retellings. Their main motivation was to desecrate legends which appeared to them to be fanciful and irrational and to make their audience think in other ways.
(Presented in the International Conference – Buddhist Narrative in Asia and Beyond, 9-11 August 2010, Imperial Queen's Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from The Thailand Research Fund (TRF), in co-operation with Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Asian Studies, The Confucius Institute, Chulalongkorn University and l’École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO))