More Jataka Tales
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- For readers who want to encounter Buddhist Jataka tales in the original English and explore fable narrative
- For English learners and children's literature enthusiasts who need short story material
- For readers interested in Project Gutenberg public-domain ebooks and early children's literature
- For parents looking for brief English fables suitable for parent-child reading
Not a good fit for
- For readers seeking systematic Buddhist teaching, annotations, or scholarly introductions
- For readers who prefer long, continuous plots and do not accept short-story collections
- For readers with weak English reading skills who rely on Chinese translations and notes
Reading tips
- There is no need to read from beginning to end; pick stories by title and read one or two fables at a time to keep a relaxed pace.
- As you read, pay attention to the moral at the end of each story and try to summarize its meaning in your own words.
- English learners can read through once before looking up new words, avoiding word-by-word translation that interrupts the narrative.
- Readers unfamiliar with the Buddhist background can read alongside introductory material on the Jataka tales.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Ellen C. Babbitt was an American writer known for retelling stories from the Buddhist Jataka tales. Her work More Jataka Tales continues in this direction, drawing on ancient Buddhist parables and retelling in English their brief animal stories and moral fables for English-language readers. These retellings are not scholarly translations but rather narratives aimed at general readers, and so the prose is concise and the plots clear, preserving the didactic and allegorical flavor of the originals. Public information is limited: her biographical details, birth and death years, and educational background are unknown, and only one of her works is held in this collection. Nevertheless, her English retellings of the Jataka stories offer an accessible path for English-speaking readers to learn about this Buddhist literary tradition, giving them some significance in the transmission of children's literature and fable collections.
