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THE J1 TAKA B00A
207
or legends. They usually give us neither framework nor verses. In them the Buddha, in his previous birth, is never identified with an animal, or even with an ordinary inan. He is identified only with some famous sage of bygone times.
6. Our present edition is not an edition of the text, but of the commentary. It was written probably in the fifth century A.D. in Ceylon by an author whose name is not known.
7. This commentary, which contains all the verses, contains also the prose stories in which they occur. To each such story it further gives a framtilork of introductory episode (stating when and wiere and on what occasion the story is supposed to have been spoken by the Buddha); and of final identification (of the characters in each story with the Buddha and his contemporaries in a previous birth).
8. This commentary is a translation into Pali of the commentary as handed down in Ceylon. That earlier commentary, now lost, was in the Singhalese language throughout, except as regards the verses, which were in Pali.
9. The Pali commentary, as we now have it, has in the stories preserved, for the most part, the tradition handed down from the third century B.C. But in one or two instances variations have already been discovered.
10. As regards the allusions to political and social conditions, they refer, for the most part, to the state of things that existed in North India in and before the Buddha's time.
11. When the original Jātaka was being gradually
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
