Mystical systems
Jataka Tales
Direct answer
Jataka Tales: The Jataka tales are a large body of Buddhist stories, 547 in the Pali collection, each telling of an earlier life of the Buddha as a human being, an animal or a god.
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At a glance
- Also called
- jatakas, jataka stories, past lives of the buddha, buddhist birth stories
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Reincarnation, Karma, Samsara, Nirvana
The Jataka tales are a large body of Buddhist stories, 547 in the Pali collection, each telling of an earlier life of the Buddha as a human being, an animal or a god.
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What are the Jataka tales?
Jataka means birth story. In each tale the one who is to become the Buddha, called the Bodhisatta, appears in a former existence: a hare, a monkey king, a deer, a caravan leader, a minister, a prince. He acts with some virtue, often at great cost, and the story is offered as one step on the immensely long road to awakening.
The tales follow a fixed frame. An incident in the Buddha's community prompts him to say that the same thing happened long ago. He tells the old story, which turns on one or more verses, and closes by identifying who was who: the wise hare was himself, the greedy jackal a certain monk. Many of the plots are older Indian fables put to Buddhist use, and some have cousins in Aesop.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Past lives and karma.
What sets Jataka Tales apart
A Jataka is told backwards from a claim of memory. Buddhist doctrine holds that on the night of his awakening the Buddha recalled his former births in detail, and the tales are presented as samples of that recollection, each pinned to an occasion in his later life. The hero need not be the most important character and is sometimes only a bystander, a tree spirit watching. The longest stories come last and are matched to ten perfections, such as generosity, patience and resolve, that a future buddha must complete.
- Meaning: birth story, from the Sanskrit and Pali jataka
- Pali collection: 547 tales, arranged by the number of verses in each
- Parts of each tale: a story of the present, a story of the past and an identification
- Early carvings: Bharhut and Sanchi, about the second and first centuries BCE
- Prose commentary: compiled in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE
- Final tale: the Vessantara Jataka, on the perfection of giving
Often mistaken for something else: The Panchatantra is an Indian book of animal fables that teaches worldly prudence; a Jataka may use the same plot but frames it as an earlier life of the Buddha and draws a moral of virtue.
The story behind Jataka Tales
Only the verses belong to the Pali canon. The prose that carries the stories is a commentary put into its present shape in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE. The tales themselves are far older: scenes from them, labelled by name, are carved on the stone railings at Bharhut and Sanchi from about the second and first centuries BCE. A polished Sanskrit retelling of thirty-four, the Jatakamala of Aryashura, dates from around the fourth century. The English translation edited by E. B. Cowell appeared in six volumes between 1895 and 1907.
Why Jataka Tales matters
They are the oldest and largest body of past-life narrative in any religion, and they show how Buddhists have pictured karma working across lives.
How to read Jataka Tales
Monks tell them in sermons, parents to children, and artists across Asia have carved and painted them; scholars mine them for early Indian social life.
Jataka Tales in practice: an example
In one tale the Bodhisatta, born as a hare, has no food to give a hungry traveller and offers his own body, and the god Sakka marks the moon with a hare in his honour.
Where readings of Jataka Tales go wrong
They are teaching stories. Buddhist tradition treats them as the Buddha's recollections, but they are not historical reports.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- jataka tales meaning, jatakas, jataka stories, past lives of the buddha, buddhist birth stories
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What are the Jataka tales?
They are Buddhist stories about the previous lives of the Buddha. The main Pali collection has 547, ranging from short animal fables to long romances, each showing a virtue practised in an earlier birth.
How old are the Jataka tales?
Carvings of them survive from about the second century BCE, so many were in circulation by then. The written prose versions in Pali were fixed about seven centuries later.
What is the last Jataka tale?
In the Pali collection it is the story of Prince Vessantara, who gives away everything he has, including his kingdom's prized elephant and at last his own family. It stands for the perfection of generosity.
