it’s “Steven” 
but apart from that I mostly agree with you.
Metta
See how uncertain knowledge really is? Scholars cannot even agree on the spelling of “his” (if, indeed he is one, male person) name. 
If we cannot be certain of such a basic fact, how much more do we not know of his existence?
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Maybe not! Maybe I was talking about a completely different person who happened to have been called “Stephen”. How would we ever know?
(But seriously, my bad, I’ve corrected it now, thanks.)
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Great minds and all that …
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Stephen Collins was the dad in 7th Heaven.
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Steven Collins (16 September 1951 – 15 February 2018) was a British-born Buddhist studies scholar.
It is according to Dhamma principles (per SN 14.15) that different individuals are drawn to different teachings. Here, Mr Collins seemed to take a deep interest in Jataka as representing the essence of Buddhism; comparing the wisdom in Jataka with the wisdom of Solomon in the Old Testament:
He seemed to admonish a Jataka where the (Bodhisatta) monkey told a deliberate lie to a crocodile with the intention to stop the crocodile from murdering him (the monkey) so the crocodile’s pregnant wife could eat the monkey’s heart.
Interesting man at 17:00 referring to “enlightened neurotics”. 
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Jokes aside, great essay Bhante. You’ve highlighted some of the aspects of the article that bothered me but which I hadn’t quite articulated before.
That said, I did appreciate the “obvious” side of Collins’ article. His insistence on separating out Theravada from Early Buddhism in particular is, of course, an important topic you’ve written about yourself (if, admittedly, with a clarity and precision Collins’ himself admitted was lacking from his own work).
There’s a similar problem across the sciences these days, where in many fields you get more citations for writing meta-analysis than for doing original research. I’m not sure what the solution is, but still, it is sometimes helpful to “restate the obvious”
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Yes, in his later work he seemed to get the idea that somehow the Jatakas were the earliest form of Buddhism? I haven’t followed his work, honestly it seems so kooky I don’t know what to make of it.
Sure, some of the topics are important, we deserve a better articulation of them.
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I was rather pleased to hear this. For many years the only person I’ve heard comparing Jātaka paññā with Solomonic ḥoḵmah is … me. Now I don’t feel so lonely.
The Jātaka parallel for the Judgment of Solomon story that Collins alludes to is in the Mahā-ummagga.
A certain woman took her son and went down to the sage’s tank to wash her face. After she had bathed her son she laid him in her dress and having washed her own face went to bathe. At that moment a female goblin saw the child and wished to eat it, so she took hold of the dress and said, “My friend, this is a fine child, is he your son?” Then she asked if she might give him suck, and on obtaining the mother’s consent, she took him and played with him for a while and then tried to run off with him.
The other ran after her and seized hold of her, shouting, “Whither are you carrying my child?”
The goblin replied, “Why do you touch the child? he is mine.”
As they wrangled they passed by the door of the hall, and the sage, hearing the noise, sent for them and asked what was the matter. When he heard the story, although he knew at once by her red unwinking eyes that one of them was a goblin, he asked them whether they would abide by his decision. On their promising to do so, he drew a line and laid the child in the middle of the line and bade the goblin seize the child by the hands and the mother by the feet. Then he said to them, “Lay hold of it and pull; the child is hers who can pull it over.”
They both pulled, and the child, being pained while it was pulled, uttered a loud cry. Then the mother, with a heart which seemed ready to burst, let the child go and stood weeping. The sage asked the multitude, “Is it the heart of the mother which is tender towards the child or the heart of her who is not the mother?”
They answered, “The mother’s heart.”
“Is she the mother who kept hold of the child or she who let it go?”
They replied, “She who let it go.”
“Do you know who she is who stole the child?”
“We do not know, O sage.”
“She is a goblin,—she seized it in order to eat it.”
When they asked how he knew that he replied, “I knew her by her unwinking and red eyes and by her casting no shadow and by her fearlessness and want of mercy.”
Then he asked her what she was, and she confessed that she was a goblin.
“Why did you seize the child?”
“To eat it.”
“You blind fool,” he said, “you committed sin in old time and so were born as a goblin; and now you still go on committing sin, blind fool that you are.” Then he exhorted her and established her in the five precepts and sent her away; and the mother blessed him, and saying, “May’st thou live long, my lord,” took her son and went her way.
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Venerable. What is the Pali for “goblin”? Thank you
The impression is the Solomon story was composed in Babylon.
Biblical commentators believe the Books of Kings were written to provide a theological explanation for the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Babylon in c. 586 BCE and to provide a foundation for a return from Babylonian exile.
The story is commonly viewed in scholarship as an instance or a reworking of a folktale. Its folkloristic nature is apparent, among other things, in the dominance of direct speech which moves the plot on and contributes to the characterization.[1] The story is classified as Aarne-Thompson tale type 926, and many parallel stories have been found in world folklore. In Uther’s edition of the Aarne-Thompson index,[2] this tale type is classified as a folk novella, and belongs to a subgroup designated “Clever Acts and Words”. Eli Yassif defines the folk novella as “a realistic story whose time and place are determined … The novella emphasizes such human traits as cleverness, eroticism, loyalty, and wiliness, that drive the plot forward more than any other element”.[3]
Hugo Gressmann has found several similar stories in world folklore and literature, especially in India and the far east.[4] One Indian version is a Jataka story dealing with Buddha in one of his previous incarnations as the sage Mahosadha, who arbitrates between a mother and a Yakshini who is in the shape of a woman, who kidnapped the mother’s baby and claimed he was hers… In other Indian versions, the two women are widows of one husband.[6] Another version appears in the Chinese drama The Chalk Circle (in which version the judge draws a circle on the ground),[7] which has spread worldwide, many versions and reworkings being made, among them The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a play by Bertolt Brecht.
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Off topic: this is useful. For goblin diagnostic assessment purposes.
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Should read “perspective”.
Attention to detail, excellent thanks!
It is an amazing parallel. I heard the story via Brecht. The Mahummagga generally is an incredible text.
I haven’t read much of Collins’ work on Jatakas, but I found it curious that he focused on the Vessantara. I could never get past the ethics of that one.
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I think his fascination with it, like that of my friend Ralph Flores, is in large part because it’s so much at odds with general Buddhist values, and yet has nonetheless become one of the most culturally influential and highly revered narratives in Theravadin Asia. This leads both writers to treat it (pace the Milindapañha) as an intentionally problematic work intended as a spur to the moral imagination and to critical thinking about moral problems, rather than a simple didactic account of how dāna-paramatthapāramī is to be practised by a bodhisattva.
The story piques our interest by daring to offer a folk hero, a Great Being, a saintly fool, who also seems a monstrosity or a pathological case. This Great Being could not be recommended as a babysitter! His story is grotesque and almost a parody of its own ideal—a person of great compassion, wanting to give to all, may produce (were it not for the happy ending) more suffering than he relieves.
(Ralph Flores, Buddhist Scriptures as Literature - Sacred Rhetoric and the Uses of Theory, p. 145)
Extreme Giving
If one assumes that “religious” texts are necessarily and simply didactic, then the extravagance—indeed, to use a word that will be discussed below, the tragedy—of Vessantara’s actions must be ignored or somehow smoothed over as ultimately not in conflict with Buddhism’s core values and teachings. This was done by other premodern Pali texts, although not without difficulty. But if, on the other hand, one takes the Pali textual archive—what I have called elsewhere the Pali imaginaire—to be not only recommending and extolling certain virtues and values but also thinking critically about them, then stories such as Vessantara’s are exploring value conflicts rather than ignoring or solving them. As a “religion,” Buddhism must in the end offer a resolution of the tragedies and suffering of human existence; but Pali texts (some of them, anyway) as literature, as works of art, can accept and even celebrate the fact that conflicts between transcendental and everyday values can become themselves tragic (as well as comic, as does the Vessantara story).
(Steven Collins, ed., Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka, Introduction)
The earlier discussion referred to Gellner’s idea that ideologies are meant to be offensive (in a special, Kierkegaardian sense) to everyday life and values. This is, I think, a very useful avenue for understanding the Vessantara story
[…]
Two reactions have dominated scholarship: either this [story] is simply an indication of the selfishness (for Melford Spiro, the narcissism) of monastic life and the individual quest for nirvana, or it is simply an expression in myth of the Buddhist values of generosity and renunciation. Both interpretations are mistaken in assuming that the meaning of the story is simple. It is, inter alia, a painfully honest confrontation of the difficulties of renunciation, showing that real human goods must, ultimately, be abandoned in the ascetic search for ultimate felicity; and it is the most subtle and successful attempt in Pali literature to infuse ascetic values and soteriological motifs into an ideal image of collective life in an ordinary, productive and reproductive society.
(Steven Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities, p. 497, 501)
Vessantara Jātaka
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Bhante, what should I read to learn more about this
Perhaps one could say that it is not necessarily at odds with Buddhist values, rather it extends and explores the Buddhist values found in the suttas.
Regarding Collins’ idea that the Jatakas represent early Buddhism, can someone point me to some publications where he discusses this?
To me, this is Collins’ magnum opus, a survey of Pali motifs, stories, and ideas we might describe as ‘utopian’: from Vessantara’s kingdom to analogies of Nibbāna, wheel-turning kings or the Aggañña Sutta. As Duangrudi Suksang wrote in her review, the style ‘does not readily render the reader a “nirvanic” experience’, but I would recommend this book as an introduction to Collins’ work. I find it more appealing than his criticism of the very idea of the Pali Canon or his later focus on civilization studies. He always had that bent, though, and the book is all about mapping a Theravādin-Pali ‘imaginaire’, i.e., cultural bloc—a substitute of sorts for the idea of a Canon.
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I wrote something of this in A History of Mindfulness. Check it out for lots of goodly details!
The basic idea is the the 9 angas clearly describe a set of scripture that covers similar ground to what we have today, yet the details of their exact relationship with the nikayas is hard to pin down. It seems that, as the collection grew, the division of texts by literary genre (anga) became unwieldy and a more systematic approach was sought, one that facilitated the training of mendicants in different monasteries to memorize different sets of scripture. These would be studied under specialists, since the whole collection was too large for any but the most talented monk to master. Yet at the same time, it is critical that all monastics should learn the most important teachings.
The Samantapasadika has the following passage:
Leaving aside many hundreds and thousands of monks who had memorized the entire nine aṅga textual dispensation of the Teacher, the ordinary persons, stream-enterers, once-returners, non-returners, and dry-vipassanā arahants, the Elder [Mahā Kassapa] gathered 499 monks who had memorized the Tipiṭaka with all its textual divisions, attained to the discriminations, of great might, mostly those included in the foremost disciples, gainers of the three realizations, etc., all being arahants.
This creates an association between the actions of the First Council and the shift from the anga system to the nikayas. Obviously the details stem from a much later text, but in any case it is clear that there was a shift from the angas to the nikayas, and it seems obvious that the Councils would been a part of this.
Note that all the schools have the nikaya/agama system, yet the contents vary considerably. Thus it seems that the general system was established early, perhaps indeed at the First Council, but the organizational details were left to different teachers.
Ven. YinShun suggests that although the anga system slightly came first, the gradual formation of the nine angas happened in parallel with development of the four Nikayas/Agamas, of which SN/SA (i.e., the synthesis of the first three angas) was the foundation (p.10):
Pages 9-11 from The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism Choong Mun-keat 2000.pdf (251.7 KB)