If animals could talk, what would they tell us? It’s a question that many have wondered, and one that ancient Buddhist scholars tried to answer through the Jataka tales. The tales are stories, compiled between 200 and 400 BC, that are popular to this day amongst Buddhists and children alike.
One aspect of what makes the tales so timeless remains its animal characters. Animals – living beings with the same desire for survival and fear of death as humans – serve as mouthpieces for hard truths about both the world we live in and the way we live in it.
The narrative takes the reader through the past lives of the Buddha; moments in time when the Buddha is reincarnated; in forms ranging from that of a goat to that of a monkey, and sometimes, as human participants in exchanges concerning animals.
For Reiko Ohnuma, a Buddhist scholar and Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, to be reincarnated as an animal is an “unfortunate destiny” in the Buddhist purview. This idea lends itself aptly to the title of her 2017 book “Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination”.
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