Tales and Teachings of the Buddha

Tales and Teachings of the Buddha - now carefully pruned, corrected and revised - builds on the ground-breaking work done by Gombrich, Spiro and Tambiah in their field studies of lay Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand. It demonstrates that within the Buddhist tradition itself there is a vast fund of folkloric material which is more in touch with lay concerns than the more austere teaching found in the Canon proper - although it sometimes departs alarmingly from the orthodox tradition. Both sources, J?taka and Canon, each vast in extent, are thoroughly explored and compared, making them more accessible than they have ever been before, and revealing the extent to which concessions have been made by the monks to the laity and also the extent to which the monks themselves have been influenced by the folk tradition in which they were reared.