The story literature of India is in a large measure the outcome of the moral revolution of the peninsula connected with the name of Gautama Buddha. As the influence of his life and doctrines grew, a tendency arose to connect all the popular stories of India round the great teacher. This could be easily effected owing to the wide spread of the belief in metempsychosis. All that was told of the sages of the past could be interpreted of the Buddha by representing them as pre- incarnations of him. Even with Fables, or beast-tales, this could be done, for the Hindoos were Darwinists long before Darwin, and regarded beasts as cousins of men and stages of development in the progress of the soul through the ages. Thus, by identifying the Buddha with the heroes of all folk-tales and the chief characters in the beast-drolls, the Buddhists were enabled to incorporate the whole of the story-store of Hindostan in their sacred books, and enlist on their side the tale- telling instincts of men.

In making Buddha the centre figure of the popular literature of India, his followers also invented the Frame as a method of literary art. The idea of connecting a number of disconnected stories familiar to us from _The Arabian Nights_, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_, Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, or even _Pickwick_, is directly traceable to the plan of making Buddha the central figure of India folk-literature. Curiously enough, the earliest instance of this in Buddhist literature was intended to be a Decameron, ten tales of Buddha's previous births, told of each of the ten Perfections. Asvagosha, the earlier Boccaccio, died when he had completed thirty-four of the Birth-Tales. But other collections were made, and at last a corpus of the JATAKAS, or Birth-Tales of the Buddha, was carried over to Ceylon, possibly as early as the first introduction of Buddhism, 241 B.C. There they have remained till the present day, and have at last been made accessible in a complete edition in the original Pali by Prof. Fausboll.

These JATAKAS, as we now have them, are enshrined in a commentary on the _gathas_, or moral verses, written in Ceylon by one of Buddhaghosa's school in the fifth century A.D. They invariably begin with a "Story of the Present," an incident in Buddha's life which calls up to him a "Story of the Past," a folk-tale in which he had played a part during one of his former incarnations. Thus the fable of the Lion and the Crane, which opens the present collection, is introduced by a "Story of the Present" in the following words:--