Mrs. Rhys Davidson, in Stories of the Buddha (Chapman and
Hall, 21s.), has published a selection of the Jataka stories relating to the traditional previous incarnations of the Enlightened One, from the Pali text, which she has done so much to make known to the West. Although this is a book for the serious student rather than for the general reader, some of the stories are very beautiful. We have, for instance, the Jataka of the tusker elephant, whose wife in a former incarnation, at that time the Queen of Benares, sent a hunter out to kill him in order to obtain his tusks. In order to fulfil her desires and save the hunter trouble, the good elephant (a Bodhisatva) knelt down and sawed them off himself. We remember seeing the scene illustrated in one of the best preserved of the frescoes of Ajanta.
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