Reading Notes: Aryasura's Gatakamala, Part A

My favorite story from the Part A collection of Aryasura's The Gatakamala, or collection of translated Jataka tales, is "The Story of the Small Portion of Gruel." This story stood out to me the most when looking at the titles of the Jatakas in this section, because it seemed to me that this was a very realistic problem that could arouse disagreement and lead to a sort of moral lesson, instead of the fantastic or anthropomorphized stories which often make up Jataka tales.

The story begins by extolling the virtues of the Buddha, which lay the groundwork for his motivations and actions later in the story -- the Buddha is pure and only can be pure, so that the misdeeds of others in the story are contrasted against the restraint of the Buddha. He begins the story as a king of Kosala. His wife asks him why he keeps reciting an odd phrase about gruel, which has made everyone around the town uncomfortable, so the king tells her that he, in a previous life, lived in the town as a servant. Though he did not earn much of a livelihood, the servant invited to eat with him four monks who were going around looking for alms, and he fed each of them a small portion of gruel. Concluding his story, he is extolled as virtuous and concludes that he will continue to act with the same giving heart.

Then, the queen describes one of her previous lives, when she was a slave who awoke to be a queen after acting with good merit. Thus, the story ends with a number of dialogue passages about the merit of almsgiving, and the final paragraph is a sort of Aesopian moral conclusion: "So any gift that proceeds from faith of the heart, and is bestowed on a worthy recipient, produces a great result."

Gruel. Yum? Maybe not. Source.

Bibliography: Aryasura, The Gatakamala. https://archive.org/stream/gatakamalaorgarl00arya#page/24/mode/2up.