I’ve just been toying a little with some Jataka verses, and discovered a few things of interest. The substantial work here is, of course, being done by Ven Anandajoti. But his work ties the text and commentary together closely, and this sometimes leads to different results.
Ja 1 Apaṇṇaka
This is the Apaṇṇakajātaka, of which the central term is derived from gambling.
The gambling context is hinted at in the last line, where the wise one "would take up” what is unfailing, i.e., a “set without a fifth” (Apaṇṇakaṁ) otherwise known as a “winning hand” (kaṭaggāha). The use of “take up” here hints at the game of dice, where the players would grab a handful of seeds, aiming to get a number divisible by four.
The verse contrasts the wise one with the takkikā, the “sophist” who argues a superficially plausible doctrine that does not withstand investigation in light of facts. This is similar to the usage in Ud 6.10. It refers to the “story of the present” (i.e. the Buddha’s lifetime), where people fell away from the Dhamma being persuaded by heretics.
What’s interesting here is that the verse does not directly refer to the actual Jataka, the “story of the past”. There, the antagonist is a yakkha, and the story is adapted from DN 23:23.1. Both the story of the past and the story of the present illustrate how foolish people were to listen to advice from bad men. But the verse is directly referring, not to the yakkha, but to the sophists, and brings in the story of the yakkha by way of illustration.
This shows that, while the Jataka verses typically relate to the story of the past, this is not always the case. In fact, it seems likely that in this case the “story of the present” was originally attached to the verse, like an Udana or a Dhammapada with commentary, and then the Jataka was inserted as illustration.
Ja 2 Vaṇṇupatha
This continues the theme of travelling across a desert with a trading caravan. At the time the Jatakas were complied—post-Ashoka—the scope of trade was rapidly expanding. Buddhist mendicants travelled the same routes, sometimes with the caravans, brining Dhamma to new places. So they learned the traveller’s stories, and framed them as Dhamma teachings in ways that were relevant for their fears and hopes.
This time, it is a young worker with the caravan who digs for water. All appears lost and the caravan faces death, but the Bodhisatta will not give up. Seeing a clump of grass in the sandy waste, he listens closely and hears the distant sound of a rushing stream underground.
The interesting phrase here is udaṅgaṇe, where uda is dismissed as a mere particle by the commentary, and aṅgaṇa, from a root sense “to move” is said to be a place where people move about, an “open place”.
But uda, where it is used as a particle, typically is not meaningless; it means “either”, “or”.
Sanskrit dictionaries offer the sense “passage” for aṅgaṇa, i.e. “place through which things move”. Uda can also mean “water”, thus yielding the sense, “water-passage”, which is an apt way to refer to an underground stream.
Thus instead of translating “there in the open place he found water”, we have the more satisfying:
there at the underground stream he found water.
This establishes a close connection between the verse and the story of the past.
Ja 3 Serivavāṇija
This is the Serivavāṇijajātaka, which also tells the story of a merchant.
The title is explained as meaning, “the merchant named Serivā”, deriving it from the nation of Seriva, but no such city is attested so far as I know, nor does it play a role in the story other than a birthplace. So I don’t find this convincing.
The story concerns two merchants, one of whom, being “wanton”, (lola) tries to con a widow and her daughter out of their only valuable possession. Luckily a wise merchant pays them what it is worth.
The key word here is seri, which is from a root sense sa (one’s own) + i (go), literally, “goes one’s own way”. It’s usually used in Pali in a positive sense, of a deer who wanders free in the forest. But in Sanskrit we also find a negative sense, for which see svairī in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.11.5. Here it means a “wanton”, thus having the same sense as the commentary’s lola.
In this case the form serivā can be analyzed as a taddhita, serivā, “possessed of wantonness”, i.e “wanton one”, and the line translated,
like this wanton merchant.
In such cases, it is worth bearing in mind that it’s not that the commentary has it wrong per se. In fact, the gloss of seri as lola is still found, albeit hidden. It’s common in Pali for a person’s attribute to become their name, so one who acts in a wanton manner comes to be known as “Wanton” (“Serivā”). As the understanding of the original context recedes, the name Serivā can be explained as stemming from a nation of that name.
Now, what’s interesting here is that this verse is mostly similar to AN 8.29:15.1. The difference is that the serivā merchant is not mentioned, and instead we find the unique term atītattho. Ven Bodhi translated this, and I formerly followed him, as the merchant who has “missed a profit”, taking attha in the sense of “benefit, profit”. But it’s an odd way of putting it.
Another of the many meanings of attha is “story, affair, matter”, and in this sense it is equivalent to vatthu. In the Jatakas, the “story of the past” is always referred to as atītavatthu, and I propose that atītattho has the same meaning.
Thus instead of “like the merchant who missed a profit” we should translate, “like the merchant in the story of the past”. This suggests that the Anguttara verse is making an implied reference to the same story as that found in the Jatakas.
This might seem surprising, as the Anguttara is part of the early canon, while the Jatakas were added later. How then can an earlier text be referring to a later one?
But it’s not that simple. The Jatakas draw from an ocean of pre-existing stories, many of which may even pre-date the Buddha himself. After all, they are explicitly said to be “tales of the past”. It’s entirely possible that the Buddha referred obliquely to this story, knowing that his audience was familiar with it, and it was later added to the Jataka collection.
