Period-specific differences of style in Haribhaṭṭa’s “Garland of Jātakas” and in the “Avadāna-Śataka” (based on the deer jātaka)

Abstract

The article examines the evolution of style traced in Sanskrit literature during the development of the genre of jātaka – the story of a previous life of Buddha – at an early stage of the genre's existence, represented by the anonymous collection “Avadāna-Śataka” (around 2nd century AD), and at the stage of the developed author literature, an example of which is the “Garland of Jātakas” by Haribhaṭṭa (4th to 5th centuries AD). The pre-literary jātaka in the Pali language is fairly well studied, while the literary works we consider here, being significant for the tradition, have hardly been studied in Russian science at all. Consideration of “Avadāna-Śataka” was carried out using the approaches of epic studies applied by Pavel Grintser to the “Mahābhārata” and “Rāmāyana”, which allowed us to reveal here the traces of the formulaic style characteristic of the oral existence of texts. These traces, however, are residual and indicate the stylisation of the text to the oral style of the pre-literary jātakas included in the Buddhist canon. In general, the text style is simple and monotonous; repetitions, catalogues and formulae are often found in it. We find a clear contrast to this picture in Haribhaṭṭa’s “Garland of Jātakas”, where features of the high court Sanskrit literature of the classical period (4th to 5th centuries AD) are obvious, to which this work has been proved to belong by indirect evidence. The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the two literary works from the standpoint of historical poetics.