Book description
When my concentrated mind was purified; I directed it to the knowledge of the recollection of past lives' -The Buddha on the night of his enlightenment
Associated with the living traditions of folk tale; drama and epic; the Jatakas recount the development of the Bodhisatta-the being destined to become the…
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Why read it?
1 author picked The Jatakas as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
More popular even than the Dhammapada, and often illustrated in Buddhist architecture, are the Jataka Tales, a collection of stories from the previous lives of the Buddha. The jatakas (‘birth stories’) are premised on the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment, during which he remembered hundreds of thousands of former births.
In these past lives, he was not yet a Buddha, but a bodhisattva, which, in the Theravada tradition, is someone who has resolved to become a Buddha and received this confirmation or prediction from a living Buddha. Thus, in the Jataka Tales, the bodhisattva, having been inspired by his…
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