Читать книгу Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives (Volume 1) - Aryashura - Страница 19

When a woman is weak from intoxication,

she can even tie her parents to a tree

and ignore her husband, though he were Kubera

himself.

Such is the treasure stored in this pot!(17.28 [17])

Although Arya·shura’s individual literary skill cannot be doubted, he was, of course, also working within a tradition, a fact he is keen to emphasize when he states that he contradicts neither sacred tradition nor the Buddha’s words (1.4 [3]). Many of his stories derive material from the jataka tradition that preceded him. He especially makes use of canonical jataka verses, equivalent or similar to the stanzas preserved in the Pali Jatakatthavannana,¹⁵ and indeed thirty of the thirty-four stories in the “Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives” have parallels in the Jatakatthavannana.¹⁶ That said, Arya·shura was not afraid of innovation. In “The Birth-Story of the Hare” (6), for example, the Bodhi·sattva dies by sacrificing himself into a fire for a brahmin, a conspicuous departure from earlier versions, as preserved in the Jatakatthavannana (no. 316) and Cariyapitaka (1.10), in which the hare survives the fire unscathed (Ohnuma 2007: 29). Arya·shura thus constantly seeks to strike a balance between the need for traditional authority on the one hand and the aspiration to develop the jataka genre through fresh literary expression on the other.