Welcome to the second part of the reading notes for the first collection of Jataka Tales! I am really liking these Jataka Tales. Not all of them are good, but they remind of Aesop's Fables and they are new to me! I will talk about a few of them in this post. Here are the stories I read for this reading:
Reading Part B
The Wise and Foolish Merchant
The Elephant Girly-face
The Banyan Deer
The Princes and the Water-Sprite
The King's White Elephant
The Ox Who Never Envied the Pig
Grannie's Blackie
The Crab and the Crane
Why the Owl Is Not King of the Birds
One of the wild things about this collection was that the story of the Princes and the Water-Sprite is an exact copy of the story of the Pandevas brothers in their exile in the forest. From each brother going to get water individually, to the sprite/yaksha taking them because they didn't answer correctly, and down to the eldest brother winning all his siblings back through his morality, this is practically the same story! It was very fun to see how Buddhist texts and Indian epics influence each other, and the similarities make sense because they both were written at the same time!
In my last blog post about these Jataka Tales, I talked about all the stories where the message could be summed up as 'don't be a d*ck.' Elephant Girly-Face kind of fits into this theme, but it's also very different because the main character, Elephant Girly-Face, was just annoying to me. I didn't like that Elephant Girly-Face was so easily influenced to become mean and then just as easily was back to being nice. It made the message really unclear. Was the message to not believe what others say immediately? Or was it to not fuck around with mean elephants? Who knows.
Elephant Girly-Face literally becoming a little shit because he overheard some thieves talking: Gateway To The Classics
Another story that had a confusing message was the King's White Elephant. Here, the baby white elephant learned how to work with the carpenters, but then was sold to the king. It seems to me that the carpenters had no right to sell the elephant, because the elephant seems remarkably sentient (and so should not be sold). Besides that, the story just ends with "and the elephant went with the king and was taken care of." It didn't seem to me that the white elephant particularly deserved this good life (he was a good elephant, but didn't do something amazing), nor did he deserve to be sold to someone else at all!Overall, these stories left something to be desired. I liked the story, "Why the Owl Is Not King of the Birds" but it was just ok. Many of the stories here didn't seem to have a particular lesson or moral like the previous collection had. Maybe I just need to change my expectations for when I inevitably read more of these stories!
Vaga-Buon Voyage!
Bibliography:
Ellin Babbit. "Jataka Tales" http://www.gatewaytotheclassics.com/browse/display.php?author=babbitt&book=jataka&story=wise
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