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Description: Collects more than forty animal tales illustrating such virtues as loyalty and self-discipline and examining such shortcomings as greed and pride.
FY2017 /
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Around the beginning of the common era, Indian Buddhists began to collect fables, or jataka tales, illuminating various human virtues and foibles--from kindness, cooperation, loyalty and self-discipline on the one hand to greed, pride, foolishness, and treachery on the other. Instead of populating these stories with people, they cast the animals of their immediate environment in the leading roles--which may have given the tales a universal appeal that helped them travel around the world, surfacing in the Middle East as Aesop's fables and in various other guises throughout East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia, and Europe. Author and painter Mark McGinnis has collected over forty of these hallowed popular tales and retold them in vividly poetic yet accessible language, their original Buddhist messages firmly intact. Each story is accompanied with a beautifully rendered full-color painting, making this an equally attractive book for children and adults, whether Buddhist or not, who love fine stories about their fellow wise (and foolish) creatures.… (more)
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Reading this I cannon say whether this may be considered actual Jataka tales or not since some of the stories rather seemed more based on Aesop's Fables (or could it be the other way around?) while the emphasis on Buddha's past lives weren't strongly touched upon.
The stories were short and easy to read while I enjoyed the moral tales they had to offer. Some most definitely stood out to me as I am facing my own monkey such as the buffalo did but my response so far has been a failure when you read about his wisdom.
And the other thing that caught my eye with this particular book is the beautiful artwork. It is amazing, bright and full of details while each story has a picture showing an important scene.
Just love this introduction and may have to see if they really did come out with a 2nd volume. If they did then it will be going on my wishlist while I am hoping it kept a similar formatting as this one did.