Arthid Sheravanichkul
Chulalongkorn University (Thailand)
This paper aims to study the significance of jātakas and stories of the Buddha’s past lives in the Paṭhamasambodhikathā by the Supreme Patriarch Prince Paramanujitjinoros, the most important and well-known life text of the Buddha in Thai culture. The paper finds that the jātakas and the stories of the Buddha’s past lives are told and mentioned, firstly, by the narrator in order to show the biography of the Buddha in terms of his genealogy, his past deeds, and his bodhisattva career which concerns the concept of Thirty Pāramīs; secondly, by the Buddha himself in order to parallel the deeds of the people in the time of the Buddha to the characters in the past stories, namely, Uruvelakassapa, King Suddhodana, Bimbā, Ānanda, and Devadatta. This clearly demonstrates how the text conceptualise the biography of the Buddha and how it is influenced by the previous texts of the Buddha’s life, such as the Nidānakathā.
In addition, this reflects the functions of jātaka stories and the relation between the genres of jātakas and of the Life of the Buddha. The jātaka stories in the text are mainly from the Jātaka-aṭṭhavaṇṇanā, except the story of Vyāghrī in which the bodhisattva sacrifices his body to a starving tigress. This story is told in other traditions as a jātaka, for example, in Āryaśūra’s Jātakamālā, while it does not enjoy such status in Thai Pali textual tradition as shown in the Paṭhamasambodhikathā and the Jinakālamālinī.
(Presented in the International Conference on Buddhist Studies: Buddha's Biography – Buddhist Legends, 18-19 July 2015, Le Meridien Bangkok Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, The Pali and Sanskrit Section, Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University)