The Gâtakamâlâ or Garland of Birth-stories, by Ârya Sûra. Translated from the Sanskrit by J. S. Speyer. (Sacred Books of the Buddhists translated by various oriental scholars and edited by F. Max Müller. Vol. I.) Henry Frowde, 1895.
This is the first of a new series of volumes which the indefatigable editor, to whom English students already owe so great a debt, is commencing by the help of a subsidy from the king of Siam, for the purpose of making more widely known in Europe "the true teaching of the Buddha." Mr. Max Müller's name is a guarantee of the scrupulous care and sympathetic insight with which the works included in the new series will be rendered; and since, as he tells us, after the publication of the first three volumes "it will mainly depend on the interest which the public may take in this work, whether it can be continued or not," it is greatly to be hoped that the project may find favour with a public only too willing to shirk the trouble—and the danger—of inquiring into any religion at all.
The Gâtakamâlâ is a Sanskrit work. It is a version elaborated with literary art by Ârya Sûra, who probably flourished in the first century of the Christian Era, of thirty-four of the Gâtakas. The translation by Prof. Speyer is made from Prof. Kern's edition of the Sanskrit text, which is described by the present editor as likely to remain the final text. The English student, who is unacquainted with the original tongue, is, therefore, placed as nearly as possible in a position to judge of the work, whether as literature, as a body of doctrine, or as the crystallisation of traditions of long anterior date.
The Gâtakas, as is well known, profess to be stories of the Buddha's previous births; and it is a question how far they were believed to be literally true. Mr. Max Müller's view is that at all events "highly educated men among the Buddhists" were not "so silly as to accept the Gâtakas as ancient history;" but that they were "homilies used for educational purposes, and for inculcating the moral lessons of Buddhism." This, at least, seems from in- ternal evidence, as the editor points out, to have been the purpose for which they were intended by the writer of the Gâtakamâlâ. But there can be little doubt that by the common people they were taken more literally. Just as many of the Christian parables have been understood as narratives of actual events, so these
