dharmatheway84 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:26 am
What do you all think of Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt? Online it says that this is the best 39 of 547 tales of the Buddha's former lives. Are there versions with all 547 tales included?
Again, I'm going to generally recommend that you stay away from things over 100 years old. However, with the Jatakas, there isn't a complete modern translation.
The reason I recommend staying away from this book is that they are "retold." This is always a red flag. Retold is just another way of saying, "I made some of this up, or cut some things out, or both."
The jataka stories always happened in a context where there was a real situation happening the the time of the Buddha, and then the Buddha tells a story as a lesson. Most jataka books (new or old) cut this part out and just tell the story. Fine if you are looking for bedtime stories. Not so fine if you are interested in Buddhism.
The edition edited by Cowell (available
here as an ebook) is complete and includes the framing stories. Bhante Anandajoti is issuing an updated version of this text, but likely not as a print book. Oddly, some of the sexual stories in the original publication were translated into Latin instead of English. Bhante is translating those into English.
Ken and Visahka Kawasaki have an anthology that is very close to Cowell's edition, most of their changes just being an updating of his language. They include the frame stories. And although it is an anthology, it still contains most of the stories. The one thing I don't like about their edition is that the verses are rendered in prose and not marked as such.
But I've already included this edition in the information in the ReadingFaithfully.org link.