The Vyaghri-Jataka Known to Sri Lankan Buddhists and its Relation to the Northern Buddhist Versions
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: The Vyaghri-Jataka Known to Sri Lankan Buddhists and its Relation to the Northern Buddhist Versions MMsuMuRA Junko 1. Introductiofi On the wall of a rock cave at Aluvihara temple in Matale, Sri Lanka, amoiig othcrja-taka stories and famous paintings describing tortures in heils, several painted stories ofBodhi- sattva, orj'a-takas, are found, of which no Pali version is known.0ne of them is the weil- known story ofBodhisattva's body-sacrifice to a hungry tigress.The story is, however, not includcd in the canonical Pali Jataka collection, in which is fbund only a totally different story of tbe same name, the Vyaggha.iataka(Ja no.272), where Bodhisatara is a tree god.But the story which the people on this Theravada Buddhist island know by the name LXt5,aggha-jataka', or `Vyaghrijataka', is not the one in the Pali Jataka collection, but exactly the same story which is weli-known and wide-spread among Northe"i (or MahAyana) Bud- dhists.This fact is the starting point ef the present author's regearch for this article: Hew this story came to be knovvn in Sri Lanka.The t'acts ofthe research may reveal some ofthe historical intercourse between Southern and Northern Buddhism, upon which, so far not much research has bccn pursued.Besidcsthis, the story's vcrsion knewn on the island is not the sole one, but, as we discuss later, there seem to be several versions to be related to definite versions fbund in the Northern Budchist texts.2. Versions of the tigress story 'I'hc Bodhisattva body-sacrificc to a hungry tigrcss story (hereafter called `the tigress story', or in Skt., `VyEghri-Jataka', as in 7Xryasi[lra's JZItakamala) is Telatcd in several Northem Buddhist texts.The mest vLTell-known version may be the one in the Suvarna <pra) bhasa-satra (or the SZtvampopmbhityottamast-ttra>.For this stHttra, {here exist thc Sansknt text, the three translations in the Chinese Tripitaka, and the translatiens in Tibetan, Mongolian, Khotancsc, and Uighur languages.However, it is beyond the scope of this article to examine and compare all these -1164
Author: Junko MATSUMURA
Language: English
Topic: Indian and Buddhist Studies
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2752424809