PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

90Pacific Worldthe three-tiered cosmos. While some Jåtaka texts are explicit about reduplicatingthis cosmology, in others, the three tiers and thirty-one realms of themorally-structured universe remain as the setting or background forstories that focus their main attention on chronicling the moral developmentof various righteous and malevolent characters.THE MORAL WORLD OF THE JÅTAKAThe Trai Bh¥m representation of the world as morally structured andhierarchically organized is borne out in other texts of the period that followthe same broad outlines of its assumptions about cosmology, temporality,and morally-constructed identity. Many popular stories from the periodare concerned with the theme of individual development as charactersprogress toward either moral perfection or kingship (and in some casesboth). Joseph Guesdon, a Catholic missionary who surveyed and studiedKhmer language and literature at the turn of the twentieth century, commentedthat Khmer were obsessed with depicting the cosmic biography ofthe Buddha to the extent that “authors represent only characters in whichthe Bodhisat (or future Buddha) is the hero…. It is always a bodhisat whois reborn, suffers and who triumphs over all with miraculous aid.” 15Canonical and non-canonical vernacular Jåtaka were in general thebest known and most widely-collected texts in monastic schools andlibraries in nineteenth-century Cambodia. 16 These texts construed identityin terms of the cosmic cycle of the Buddha’s births, rebirths, and moraldevelopment. Especially ubiquitous in Khmer collections were the storiesof the last ten births, detailing the Buddha’s cultivation of the ten påram∆or perfections: generosity, moral behavior, freedom from passion, wisdom,energy, patience, truth-telling, self-determination, loving-kindness,and equanimity.Jåtaka existed in a variety of literary forms and included recognizableversions of the birth stories from the Khuddakanikåya of the Suttantapi†akaof the Påli Canon, versions of the Khmer Paññåsajåtaka (Fifty Birth Stories),17 and stories only loosely connected to one or both of these collections.One Paññåsajåtaka story that was well-known at least at the end ofthe nineteenth-century (and probably before, since it was composed at theend of the eighteenth century) was the Pañaså S∆raså. 18 It relates the storyof two youths (one of whom is a prince and bodhisatta) who are banishedto the forest and later, after numerous travails, become the kings of twodifferent kingdoms. As kings, they make visits to various realms on earthand in the heavens. 19 An excerpt of the original text offers descriptions ofthe physical landscape and human inhabitants of the three other continentsin the earthly realm, similar to those appearing in the Trai Bh¥m. The texttells of the “majestic Mount S¥mairu,” encircled by seven oceans and seven