The Pansiya Panas Jataka Pota — the Sinhala "Book of the Five Hundred and Fifty Jatakas" — is the classical Sinhala rendering of the Jataka stories, translated from the Pali Jataka commentary, the Jataka Atthakatha, during the Kurunegala period. The tales relate earlier lives of the Bodhisatta, the being who would be born as Siddhartha Gautama. They have been read, recited and retold in Sri Lanka ever since, and they sit close to the centre of Sinhala prose literature; scholarly work has examined both how the collection came to be written down and the mark the Jatakas left on later Sinhala writing.
This is one part of a multi-volume edition from Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo publishing house. The text is in Sinhala throughout. There is no English translation or parallel text, so a reader will need to be comfortable reading Sinhala prose to use it.
For anyone building the set at home, a temple library or a Dhamma school shelf, the volumes are bought part by part, and this is one of them. Buyers abroad who grew up with these stories — told at home, heard in sermons, or studied in school — will know the shape of the collection already. Those coming to it new should know that it is a continuous body of narrative rather than a reference work: each story carries its own occasion, its account of a past life, and its identification of the characters in the Buddha's own time.
For students of Sinhala literature, the Pansiya Panas Jathakaya is also a primary source in its own right. Its prose has shaped Sinhala narrative style for centuries, and the collection remains one of the standard texts a reader turns to when tracing where Sinhala storytelling comes from.
- Author: Godage Publication
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: Sinhala
- Pages: 304
- ISBN: 9789553058843
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