Dàsuìdào běnshēng 大隧道本生
The Mahā-Ummagga Jātaka (The Great Tunnel Birth-Story) Pali source-text translated by 鄧殿臣 (譯)
About the work
A modern Chinese translation of the Mahā-Ummagga Jātaka (Pali Jātaka 546), the second-longest and one of the most celebrated jātakas in the Pali canon, and the principal vehicle for the figure of Mahosadha — a precocious child-sage who, through ingenuity and discernment, becomes the chief minister of King Vedeha of Mithilā. The text consists of canonical gāthā (verse) interleaved with prose narrative and didactic case-resolution episodes (“the question of the necklace,” “the question of the donkey,” etc.) — many of which are early Indic specimens of judicial-detective fiction.
Abstract
The Pali Jātakapāḷi — the canonical book of the Khuddaka-nikāya containing 547 jātaka-verses (jātaka-gāthā) — is one of the earliest strata of the Pali canon (verse cores possibly 4th–3rd c. BCE). The accompanying prose frame (Jātaka-aṭṭhakathā), which makes the verses intelligible as narratives, is much later — traditionally ascribed to Buddhaghosa 佛音 (5th c. CE) but in fact a mixed Sinhalese-Pali compilation of his and the immediately following generations. By Sri Lankan canonical convention, only the gāthā are admitted to the Tipiṭaka; the prose aṭṭhakathā is paracanonical. Hence Dèng Diànchén notes that the prose narrative of Mahā-Ummagga is in the Sinhalese tradition treated as zàng-wài 藏外 — extra-canonical — and so finds its proper home in the Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn. A companion prose translation of the same jātaka, Fódà de qián-shēng — Dà-suìdào běn-shēng 佛陀的前生——大隧道本生, was published independently in 1993 (Fǎ-yīn wén-kù).
The composition window therefore brackets two strata: the gāthā core (4th–3rd c. BCE Pali) and the prose frame (5th c. CE Sinhalese-Pali); the conservative bracket here is 4th c. BCE through 5th c. CE.
Translations and research
- Cowell, E. B., ed., The Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895–1907; 6 vols.) — the standard English translation; Mahā-Ummagga is in vol. 6, pp. 156–246.
- Appleton, Naomi, Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism: Narrating the Bodhisatta Path (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) — modern study of the jātaka genre.
- Norman, K. R., Pāli Literature (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983).
- Dèng Diànchén 鄧殿臣, Fódà de qián-shēng — Dà-suìdào běn-shēng (Beijing: Fǎ-yīn wén-kù, 1993) — the companion prose translation.
Other points of interest
Mahā-Ummagga is the second-longest jātaka in the corpus and is by tradition the penultimate (preceding the Vessantara Jātaka) — together a pair representing the highest perfections of paññā (wisdom, exemplified by Mahosadha) and dāna (giving, exemplified by Vessantara). The text is widely depicted in Sri Lankan and Burmese mural cycles. Mahosadha is the Bodhisatta in his last but one human birth before Vessantara.