The Gâtakamâlâ: Garland of Birth-Stories

"The Gâtakamâlâ" is a work well known to students of Buddhism.
The Buddha, in telling these stories of his former births or existences, speaks of himself, not exactly as the same individual, but rather as the enlightened one, the Buddha as he existed at any and at every time; and from a moral point of view, the enlightened meant the good, the perfect man.
Those lessons seem certainly to have impressed his hearers, after they once believed that what they had to suffer here on earth was not the...