Jātaka Stories: Exploring Jātakas in Indian Texts and Art in a New Online Database
A free, searchable online database of jātakas in Indian texts and art has been launched this week. The Jātaka Stories project is being led by Dr Naomi Appleton, School of Divinity, and is funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize awarded in 2017. Dr Chris Clark joined the project in late 2018 and took the lead in structuring and populating the database, readying it for its launch.
For the purposes of the database, a jātaka is defined as any story of a past lifetime of the most recent Buddha (Śākyamuni, Gotama) which may overlap with other genres. A visual source will have been included as a Story in Art if it has been identified as depicting a jātaka, either through epigraphic evidence or the scholarship of art historians.
The database presents two basic units: Story in Text and Story in Art. Users of this database can browse stories by textual collection, in languages of Sanskrit and Pali, or by artistic site.
Database users can also explore clusters of connected stories that cross between texts and visual depictions, enabling easy exploration of a wide range of related narrative, and can conduct thematic searches as well as searches by name of place and character. Character descriptors help with differentiating between characters with the same name, and to enable searches for specific types of character. This is necessary as jātaka stories tend to describe a plethora of characters; humans, animals, gods, semi-divine beings and demonic beings.
Further expansion of the database is in planning; the project team hope to include texts and art from other parts of Asia in the near future.