Ven. Mahinda Deegalle
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University, UK
This paper will focus on the role and significance of Jataka narratives both in Pali and Sinhala languages with emphasis on the latter in shaping the life, views, values, norms, ethics and communal and popular practices of Theravada Buddhists in Sri Lanka. With a focus on how Sri Lankan Buddhists today learn about Jataka stories in public schools, in Sunday dhamma schools, in the depictions of temple paintings, in Buddhist sermons, in vernacular Sinhala literature such as cartoons and picture books and in popular mass media such as TV and postal stamps, the use of Jataka narratives in Buddhist contexts in modern Sri Lanka will be examined having specific geographical, social, historical and political contexts in the background. In the secular state where Buddhism is given the foremost place, the way that recent Sri Lankan governments have supported the worldview expressed by Jatakas by issuing postal stamps to commemorate various Buddhist festivals such as Vesak will be considered. The paper will concentrate on how and why the ancient Jataka narratives still appeal and form the bedrock in the formation of values and norms of Sinhala Buddhist culture by evoking popular as well as pious sentiments of religious nature in the lives and imagination of modern Sri Lankans. Today both Sinhala and Pali versions of the Jatakas are used in various settings and forms and their message is paid more attention rather than the language from which they come from. Regular visits to Buddhist temples, their shrine paintings and pilgrimages to Buddhist sites throughout the country readily communicate salient values of Buddhism through Jataka narratives and they form a visual canon for cultural communication of norms and values held dear and precious in this South Asian Theravada Buddhist culture.
(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))