I am new to the Nikayas and would appreciate if anyone could point me to the right direction.
I was reading the Jātaka under the KN in suttacentral. E.g., for “Ja 1”, there are two translations, one by Bhikkhu Sujato which contains 4 short sentences (= 1 verse or 4 verses?); whereas the transaltion by Robert Chalmers is a long passage.
My understanding is that Chalmers’ is the commentary (Ja-a) as it is what being described in the database compiled by Prof Appleton, Jataka Stories And so I assume Sujato’s the “sutta”.
If my above understanding is correct, my question is: why is the “commentary” organised under the “Nikaya” in suttacentral? I thought Nikayas contain only “suttas” whereas Abhidhammapitaka contains all the commentaries?
I don’t know if there is an official answer, but at the time there was no stand-alone translation of just the verses. And many don’t make any sense at all without the commentary.
The simple answer is that the stories are interesting, and I decided to include them so they’d be available. Also, in many cases the verses don’t make sense without the stories. Since then, however, more work on the Jatakas has been done by Ven Anandajoti, and I’d recommend his site for reading Jatakas in general. Ultimately we’ll probably remove the stories.
Much later, on a whim I thought I’d try translating some Jataka verses independently of the commentaries. I was struck with how different the Jataka verses were than other late canonical verse (eg. Apadanas or Cariyapitaka). Each verse poses a range of difficult and interesting issues. One thing I found was that, while it is often the case that the verses require the stories to make sense, previous translators had often forced the rendering of the verse against the meaning of the Pali so as to fit the story. So I focused on translating the verses as they are, contradicting the story if that was called for.
We are aware of similar tensions in other parts of the literature. For example, the Vinaya has origin stories that illustrate the rules, but there are several cases where the rule and the story don’t exactly match up. This is because the rule came first and the stories were added much later.
Anyway, this is a project that I intend to pick up again at some point. But my main focus is the annotation of the early texts, revising the translations as I go. That’ll take a few years!
Also, if anyone’s interested, I’ve been taking a break from the annotation project for a while. I’m currently finishing two articles—on misogyny and on AI—and I’ll pick up the annotations when these are done, probably in a week or two.
Thank you so much for pointing me to the work of Ven Anandajoti, Bhante. I was reading Ja 1 and was wondering why the Chalmers trans. did not match the PTS corresponding Pali texts (the trans. missed out a few paragraphs towards the end after the verse). And I just learnt from Ven Anandajoti that it was indeed omitted!
