সংজ্ঞায়ন, সংলাপায়ন ও নেতৃত্বকরন : মহাযানী বৌদ্ধ জাতকের গল্পবুনটে প্রানীসত্ত্বার মানবিকীকরনের প্রকৃতি অন্বেষণ / Definition, Dialogization, and Leadership: Exploring the Humanization of Animal Beings in the Narrative Fabric of Mahayana Buddhist Jataka Tal

Abstract

Folklore or the culture of story-telling considers a most significant primary source of socio-cultural history of Early India. Being a most significant literary corpus in Early India (circa. 300 BCE to 300CE), the folklore contains various quasi-historical literary features like Anthro Morphism or personification of animal character in subjective context. The themes of Indian Folklore are mainly chosen religio-cultural ethos based on ethos of concerns religion in the period. The Buddhist Jataka considers as a one of the famous ethical folklores in this time period.

             Being the collection of 547 birth stories of previous life of Buddha, the stories of Jataka tales contain many personified animal characters that popularized adoption of human-centric moral values and power of communication among the animal species, consider as spiritual merits in traditional Mahayana Buddhology. The ethical animal character became the moral agents of Buddhism to spread Buddhist values in the process of thematic development of the stories. But in the climax position of some animal theme centred Jataka, the stories initiate emergencing of self-spoken leadership category among the animal with vocal agency of proto animal right and ecological ethics. The article initiated to trace of dialectical psychological perspective of motivation and agency system related to the Anthro Morphism of Jataka stories with prioritizing the theme of development of notion of leadership among the personified animal of Jataka stories. The arrival of self-speaking animal character of Jataka became of counter agent of ethical Anthro morphism with containing the essences of proto animal right and environmental ethics.

            On the procedure of thematic development of the theme, the article has adopted qualitative textual and conceptual analysis of stories of animal jataka that is selected through purposive sampling based on having the human like qualities and situation of emergences of leadership incorporating the theme traditional Buddhology and counter-narratives technique that popularly familiar in post-colonial subaltern historiography in parallel manners through including expression of embodied marginal voices of animal in the conversation of  ‘Animal-Leader Buddha.’