Animals and Environment in the Buddhist Birth Stories

The Jātaka is a genre that consists of stories of the Buddha’s rebirths prior to his final birth as Gautama Buddha, including both human and animal rebirths. According to Chapple’s article “Animals and Environment in the Buddhist Birth Stories” (1997), the most comprehensive volume of Jātaka tales numbers 550 stories from Buddhaghosa’s Pali translation of them. Of the 550, 225 refer to animals, with monkeys (27), elephants (24), jackals), lions (19), crows (17), and deer (15) having the most representation according to Chapple’s analysis.

While the tales contain moral lessons and use animal characters as a “didactic tool” (Chapple, 144), they are certainly more than mere folktales; indeed, much has been made of what the Jātaka reveals about Indian Buddhist thought regarding ethics, theory of mind, and animals themselves. That last point has been the subject of some contention, which Appleton charts out neatly in “What Does It Mean To Be a Badly Behaved Animal? An Answer from the Devadatta Stories of the Pāli Jātaka” (2019). Whereas Harris (2006) argued that, given the knowledge that the animal characters in the Jātaka tales would become humans, their animality was negligible, Ohnuma (2017) contended that the animality of animals still mattered.