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This book deals with the corpus of JÄtaka texts and other similar stories, preserved in Pali, which describe the past lives of the Buddha. Despite its title, it has little to say about TheravÄda Buddhism. For like most of the TheravÄda canon, the core of the Pali JÄtakas were composed before the formation of the TheravÄda tradition in Sri Lanka, and indeed before the earliest evidence relating to the formation of Buddhist schools (or sects) in India. Apart from chapters 7 and 8, which consider the uses of the JÄtaka stories in Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, the book is instead a study of ideology and textual formation in early Indian Buddhism.
If there is a major theme of the book, it is that the JÄtaka tales do not, in fact, narrate the "Bodhisatta path": the book rejects the notion that the JÄtakas "illustrate the gradual perfection" of the Buddha to be - the "Bodhisatta" - in his past lives (p. 13). That is to say, it argues that the JÄtaka corpus did not originally constitute a sacred biography showing how the Bodhisatta accumulated a number of spiritual perfections (usually ten) on the way to becoming the historical Buddha. The evidence for this position is set out in chapters 2-5.
Chapter 2 ("The Bodhisatta in JÄtaka stories") points out that the JÄtakas do not address the TheravÄdin list of ten perfections directly (p. 26), and that the Bodhisatta does not...