Twin Buddhist Hymns, Shared Title: The Structural Intertextuality and Tradition of the Composition of the Sanskrit–Tibetan Bilingual Jātakastava and the Khotanese Version

In the history of Buddhist literature, there have been two texts sharing the title Jātakastava (Birth Stories Hymn), one in Khotanese and the other in Sanskrit and Tibetan. These two texts exhibit similarities in genre, framework structure, thematic selection, and narrative logic, while diverging in the arrangement of specific materials, textual length, authorship, dissemination regions, and translation approaches. This study examines the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava—a text that has received limited scholarly attention—and undertakes a comparative analysis with the Khotanese Jātakastava to reassess the relationship between these two texts bearing the same title, as well as their associated authors and translators. Through the inclusion of stories such as the Elephant King Leaping off a Cliff and King Maitrībala sacrificing his flesh to feed the rākṣasas, the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava reinforces the sequence of the six perfections (pāramitās) and exhibits a more pronounced thematic progression in its arrangement, thus representing a concise model of classical Sanskrit hymns. The Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual text is attributed to Jñānayaśas, who may be associated with the Northern Zhou translator Shénà Yēshě 闍那耶舍. The text was translated into Tibetan by the scholar Chos skyong bzang po of the Zhwa lu school, whose word-for-word rendering style possibly reflects a grammatical and commentarial approach characteristic of the Zhwa lu school’s linguistic studies. The Khotanese Jātakastava may be seen as an expanded recension of this Buddhist hymn tradition as it existed in Dunhuang around the tenth century, while the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual version represents an abridged form that reached Tibet in the fifteenth century. The similarities and differences between the two texts reveal the inherent tension between localized dissemination and standardized compilation in the transmission of Jātaka narratives.