20 CHAPTER ONE1.4.1 The Bodhisattva's Remembrance of
His Past Lives and the Jatakas
The three knowledges that constituted the Awakening-remembrance of past
lives, knowledge of the death and rebirth of beings, and knowledge of the
ending of the asravas-had a long-term effect on Buddhist doctrine. The Bod-
hisattva's remembrance of his previous lives during the first watch of the night
gave rise to a large body of story literature, in many recensions, called the
]atakas or Tales of the [Buddha's] Past Lives. From the tale ofSumati, when the
Bodhisattva vowed in the presence of the previous Buddha Dip ankara to
achieve Buddhahood (Strong EB, sec. 1 A.1), to the account of his penulti-
mate human life as the Prince Vessantara (Strong EB, sec. 1.4.2), the Pali
Jatakas record 357 past lives as a human being, 66 as a god, and 123 as an ani-
mal. Few of the tales portray the Bodhisattva as a woman, but there is no
telling whether this was the result of a bias on the part of the Buddhist com-
pilers or a limitation in the pre-Buddhist narrative tradition from which they
drew. The Jatakas have been enormously popular throughout the Buddhist
world, serving as themes for painting and sculpture, from the early Buddhist
stUpas (memorial shrines or reliquaries) onward. Some of the tales instruct
Buddhists in proper ethical action, whereas others emphasize the supreme ef-
fort the Bodhisattva needed to make in perfecting the virtues required for
Awakening over the course of many lifetimes. As the Jatakas portray his di-
verse incarnations-from ascetic, king, wonder worker, gambler, smith, and
robber, to tree spirit, mountain deity, and all manner of animals, including
lizard, frog, dog, pig, and rat, but never as a denizen of the lower destinies-
they give a sense of the vast drama of life in which the Bodhisattva partici-
pated before his last life as Gautama. For Buddhists, the "biography" of the
present Buddha consists not of one but of many lives.
1.4.2 The Wheel of Life and the Hierarchy of Beings
(Strong EB, sees. 1.5.1, 1.5.2)
Gautama's vision of the details of smpsiira (the round of existence) and karma
during the second night watch-combined with the 12 preconditions for suf-
fering (see Section 1.4.3)-was systematized in later Buddhist art in the image
of .the Wheel of Life. This image (see figure on p. 27) is a map Buddhists use
to make the cosmos intelligible and to show the way to salvation. The earliest
extant pictorial representation of the wheel is at Ajanta; it was developed es-
pecially in Tibetan Buddhist art, where the wheel was often conspicuously
painted in monastery vestibules or on hanging scrolls used for meditation.
Buddhist texts present no account of creation, as sa~sara is said to have no
discernible point of origin in time. Rather, the Sutras stress that it is more im-
portant to understand the constant re-creation of the round through one's acts
of intention, for then one can find one's way out of the round. The Wheel of
Life, the Buddhist cosmology, is thus the psychological equivalent of a cre-
ation myth, an attempt to account for a person's world experience in terms of
the drama of personal choice and consequence. The entire wheel is held in