 Thank you very much for the very generous introduction, I feel slightly under pressure now. Perhaps rather than a trajectory, this talk and this project, the wider project to which it belongs, kind of take me back to where I began with my undergraduate dissertation and my master's dissertation on different versions of a particular jattica story, in that case the story of the merchant singler who is shipwrecked on an island of demonesses and escapes with the help of a flying horse, the story many of you will know. And this whole idea of comparing jatticas and thinking about jatticas across different parts of the Buddhist world is kind of going back to that and also picking up an opportunity made available by a prize from the Libyhum Trust to dip my toe into some digital humanities, which is new to me as is working with visual culture. So I hope you'll be gentle and supportive and I'm really looking forward to your input at the end as well. So, if you wander around the great stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, which I'm sure many of you have visited, I have to confess I have not, but I hope to very soon. You will find several jattica stories depicted on the elaborately carved gateways. So on the southern pillar of the western gateway, for example, you'll find a celebrated image of the Mahakapi jattica in which the Bodhisattva is a monkey king who makes his body into a bridge in order to save his troop from a human king before then giving a sermon to that king. So you can see that one up on the left. Just across from that you'll find a similar sized image depicting the Samar or Shama jattica in which the Bodhisattva looks after his old and blind parents before being shot by a king. King's a bad in these stories, you may have noticed already. The story of the extraordinary generous prince Feisantara or Vishwantara, also known as Sudana, which has long been acknowledged as a very important jattica in the Buddhist world, occupies both faces of an entire architrave at Sanchi. I should have said at the beginning, a jattica story just in case you don't know, a story of the past life of the Buddha. And then there are three separate architraves on three separate gateways at Sanchi that depict also we are told. The jattica story of Chedanta or Chedanta is the six tusked elephant Bodhisattva who gives away his tusks to a hunter. And the hunter has been sent to get these tusks by a human reincarnation of the elephant's jealous former wife. You'll get this, there'll be more on the story in a moment. One of the intriguing things about these three depictions is that they don't offer any narrative sequence. So each of them is a separate depiction on separate gateways. Two of them simply present a single scene. A six tusked elephant is just about discernible amongst ordinary elephants. I don't know if you can just about see, so in fact there's two depictions there, either side of the tree. This screen is protecting them really well actually, so that's nice. So you can see there are six tusked elephants amongst ordinary elephants and they're enjoying a life of plenty if you like. The third does have discernible narrative content, so it does have a scene of elephants frolicking in a lotus pool, which is very important to the story. And then you can also see the hunter just here with his bow and arrow about to shoot the king of elephants. And the presence of three separate images at this one site really intrigued me. There are only half a dozen stories chosen for depiction at Sanchi. And presumably this reflects a system of patronage and sponsorship that allowed the site to be constructed, so we can imagine different parts of the site being divided up and sponsored and people having perhaps relatively free reign as to what they would like to be depicting. And while this system of patronage might explain why we've ended up with three images that appear to be of the same story, it doesn't actually explain why this particular story or why this particular six tusked elephant. And Sanchi isn't the only evidence of the story's popularity as we've been discovering in recent weeks. As early as 1895, Leon Fier noted in an article for the genre Asiatique, the presence of five distinct textual versions of the story, these ones. The Dumapada commentarial story I've put in brackets just because it actually bears quite little resemblance to the rest. In a 1911 article, Alfred Fouscher added a few more textual versions and also considered multiple artistic depictions, so he helped him to advance a theory, largely a chronological theory about how the different versions of the story developed. We can add now many more textual and visual depictions, including a really nice version in Harry Butters' Jatica Mahler, which is very similar in plot to the Pali to Dante Jatica, but rather different in style. And you can see there's a really big range of different types of text here. We've got Viniotex, we've got Jatica collections, we've got Avedana collections, we've got evidence of the popularity of the story in Central Asian context. We've got it featuring in lists of amazing past lives of the Buddha in the Kotoniz Jatica Stava and also in the Mahayana Rastrapahla Pari Pruchasutra. We're really finding this story all over the place. We also find it associated with pilgrimage, so in Jwansang's travelogue we find a little description of a pilgrimage site near Varanasi, which is associated with the story. So you can see his little description of that on the slide too. So we have this six tusked elephant king and a hunter who disguises himself in monk's robes. And then out of respect for the robe, the elephant king extracted its tusks and gave them to the hunter. So because of all these variants and occurrences, we decided to choose this story of the generous six tusked elephant Bodhisattva as a case study for an exploration of a wider question, which is the role of jatica texts and images in Indian Buddhism. So we're going to be using this story to frame this lecture and to explore how we might study versions. I want to put versions in little scare quotes. Versions of stories both within textual sources and across the boundary between textual and visual jaticas. I'm going to hand over to Chris for the next bit, so just excuse us while we do the microphone hand over. We're being recorded for posterity. I hope posterity appreciates it. So the ideas that we would like to explore today and also in the seminar on Saturday have largely come out of an ongoing research project on jatica literature and art, generously funded by the Leader Hume Trust. A major component of this research is building an online searchable database of Indian texts and art relating to the jaticas. So this database will include details from several Sanskrit collections and Pali collections. Hopefully eventually we'll add texts from other languages, as well as the paintings and stone carvings of several artistic sites in India. One of the features of this database that we're especially excited by is the linking of parallel stories in texts and art. So this will allow the user to explore different tellings of essentially the same story across a wide variety of texts and also artistic sites. So the process of judging whether a story is a parallel version of another story has raised a number of interesting questions such as what exactly is a parallel, how do we define that and why do these parallel stories even exist. So the analysis of parallels has both in texts and maybe to a lesser extent in art has been a major methodological approach that is with scholars analysing the similarities and differences of these stories and making assessments and even conclusions about the history of Buddhism. So therefore looking at just the very notion of a parallel has broad relevance to the field. So it might be helpful to firstly look at different types of parallels. So here is a list. It's not by any means an exhaustive list. So we have parallels within a text. Parallels between different texts ascribed to the same Buddhist school. Often these will be in different genres and it's interesting to look at how these stories have different emphasis in different genres. Parallels between texts ascribed to different Buddhist schools. Parallels between texts and images which is what we're trying to do with the database in particular. Parallels between different images found at a single artistic site and parallels between images found at different artistic sites. Do this we could probably add quite a few more. So it does though indicate the range of possibilities that is open to us when we are looking for and analyzing parallels. So first question is what exactly do we mean by a parallel? So different kinds of I guess genres of literature in Buddhism require different sets of criteria. So but in the case of narrative stories in Buddhist literature we're really mainly looking at a strong similarity in the plot architecture of two or more stories. So that is key storyline events in roughly the same sequence having roughly the same characters. Other events seem less important. So for example the particular names the number of characters so names of characters and places the literary style the language even themes we see parallels that have quite different themes but they're clearly very strongly related. So let's take a closer look at the past life story of the six tusked elephants that has already been briefly introduced. So we might begin with the perhaps the most well-known version of this story the Pali version called the Chedanta Jataka. So the opening narrative of this story begins at the time of Gosama Buddha with a young nun who remembers that in a previous rebirth she was an elephant queen. The Buddha notices her very animated sort of expressions when she's having this recollection and he smiles and the sangha asks him what's the cause of this smile and this provides a reason for the telling of the past life story. So in this story the Bodhisattva is previously born as an elephant king very large, white and he has six tusks. So they live by the a lake called Lake Chedanta in the Himalayas and so in parts of the story he's described as having six tusks. In other parts of the story mainly the commentarial section he's described as having two tusks with rays emanating from it with six colours so there's a bit of ambiguity in the Pali version as to what's going on there. So one day while frolicing in the forest he strikes a great cell tree in full bloom and this causes flowers, green leaves pollen to fall upon two elephant queens and it also causes dry twigs leaves and red ants to fall on the other elephant queen who is infuriated by this, very unhappy. In another occasion they're playing in the Lake Chedanta and the jealous elephant queen sees the elephant king and presents a lotus flower to the other elephant queen this makes her even more upset. So what she does is after giving alms and flowers to a group of Pachiga Buddhas sometimes translated as Solitary Buddhas she makes a fervent aspiration to be able to take revenge on the elephant king. So following this she starves herself and dies and she is reborn in a royal family as a human. She eventually becomes a queen and she remembers her former life as an elephant queen. She remembers her feelings of anger towards the Bodhisattva who is the elephant king. So she manages to convince her king, the human king to send a hunter to go and hunt down this six tusked elephant and kill him and bring back the tusks. This hunter, we're later told is none other than Deva Dasa who is quite well known in Buddhist literature he made several attempts to murder the Buddha in his final life as Gosama Buddha. So what happens is the hunter makes a long journey, manages to find this elephant king and shoots him with a poisoned arrow. The elephant king then reacts with anger and grabs the hunter but then he sees that he's wearing an ochre robe which is a sign of asceticism. So he immediately backs off and asks why did you shoot me? He finds out about the story of the elephant queen being reborn as the human queen. So what he does is he offers his tusks to the hunter. So the hunter is unable to reach up because it's such a large elephant. So the Bodhisattva elephant king has to kneel down and the hunter tries to soar off the tusks but is unable to. So then the elephant king takes the saw in his trunk and soars them off himself. So this eventually leads to the elephant king dies. The hunter returns back to the kingdom and presents the six tusks to the human queen who now is so sort of upset. She has deep remorse and in fact she's so upset that she dies. So that's the story. Not a very happy ending. So this is the Pali version. There are many other versions and there are many other stories that are clearly related. That's an image of the Pali text-side edition of the Chedanta Jataka. So this is just a selection of some of these stories. This is the versions that are preserved in Indic languages. So as you peruse this list you may notice that there are quite a few differences in the details. So what we might do is have a look at just one of these stories. So we can look at the Hasti Jataka from Haribata's Jataka Mala. So when we look at this and on Saturday we'll actually be reading this in the Sanskrit. The plot architecture is much the same as the Chedanta Jataka. It has essentially the same storyline, the same events, in general the same characters but as you read the two stories side by side quite major differences become apparent. So firstly this telling is less gruesome than the Pali version. It's also less tragic in that neither the elephant king nor the human queen dies. Basically it's a fairly happy ending. Secondly the Hasti Jataka is composed in quite ornate Sanskrit Kavya and is mainly in verse whereas the Chedanta Jataka is mainly in prose and it's in relatively unadorned style to us. Thirdly the Hasti Jataka begins and ends by praising the perfection of forbearance. So therefore this story is quite literally framed by this concern whereas the Chedanta Jataka is relatively unconcerned with the perfections and instead is mainly concerned with multi-life connections providing several rebirth identifications. So the version of the Sanskrit Hasti Jataka only gives one rebirth identification so it's relatively unconcerned with this. So in the Chedanta Jataka even at the conclusion of the story we have the young nun who was previously the elephant queen becomes awakened through listening to this story that she is intimately connected with. So these parallel versions therefore seem to have quite different purposes. In the case of the Hasti Jataka a major purpose seems to be to entertain a highly educated audience with a fine example of Sanskrit poetry complete with beautiful, lucid visual imagery with similes, eliseration the employment of several different meters and the story belongs to a fairly or highly structured work which is where every story is presented as an example of a particular perfection that the Bodhisattva practised in a previous life whereas the Pali version doesn't really discuss these perfections that much. So in order to get a better sense of what the Pali version is doing we can take a look at another related story. This is the Seal of our Naga Jataka also in the Pali collection of Jataka's. So in this story the Bodhisattva is reborn as a white elephant a white elephant king living in the Himalayas so the setting and the characters are quite similar. He sees a man lost in the forest and so he takes pity on him and he gives him food and shelter and also leads him back to the roads so then later on this sort of forester learns that ivory is highly sought after and will fetch quite a large price in the city market so he goes back to the Himalayas and he asks the elephant king for some ivory and the elephant king is quite obliging so he agrees and he kneels down and lets the forester cut off some ivory and he takes this back to the city sells it and decides to get some more so he goes back to the Himalayas and asks for some more ivory the Bodhisattva again gives him some more ivory he goes and sells this to this and then for a third time he goes back to the Himalayas and asks for some ivory and he then cuts off the the remaining section of the tusks but when he leaves the earth swallows him up as if it was unable to bear such terrible behaviour and we see sort of echoes of this in the story of Devadatta so the plot architecture of this story is quite different actually it's a matter of debate as to whether we'd actually call this a parallel story, perhaps not but they're very clearly related there are passages, short passages which are almost identical wording in the two stories so therefore we might consider them to belong to a family, a shared family or cluster of stories or categorisations aside despite their strong similarities they're actually doing quite different things that is the Chadantajataka and the Seal of Arnaga Jataka so the Chadantajataka is largely focused on the elephant queen and then when she's reborn as a human queen and her subsequent regret while the later is mainly focused on Devadatta's multi-life ingratitude and lack of remorse in fact the story begins by saying you know, here's a story about how Devadatta is always ungrateful so to this family of Chadantajataka's from the Palae collection we can add a third called the Kasabajataka also up on this slide despite telling a similar story this story is focused on the Bodhisattva's deep respect for the ochre robe as a symbol of asceticism so these three different stories are really doing quite different things they're exploring different themes even though they're clearly from the same sort of cluster of texts so this is one sort of usage I suppose of parallel stories that is they can explore different themes so in order to better understand such story families it might be helpful to turn to Ramilnodjan's work on the many and varied tellings of the Ramayana he offers a wonderful metaphor to explain their formation so he refers to a large pool of signifiers that include plots, characters names, geography, incidents and relationships in which each author dips into and brings out a unique crystallisation a unique text with a unique texture and fresh context quoting directly here from one of his works so this approach is quite helpful here I think because it challenges the potential implication that a parallel version is a variant of an invariant original exemplar which is of course quite problematic it also fits quite nicely with what we see with his family of stories about an elephant and his tusks in that each of these tellings contains a select group of signifiers from a larger pool so if we look at our parallel passages so we're kind of narrowing our focus on the sort of overall story but to specific parts of stories yet another picture seems to emerge so for instance in the Chadunca Jardica the human queen states that she dreamt of a white six tusked elephant and this really echoes the passages in which the queen Mahamaya dreams of a white six tusked elephant prior to the bodysapfer's birth similarly in the Chadunca Jardica and the related seal of a Naga Jardica sorry I'm going ahead too much so up on this slide here actually so the elephant king states that the tusks of omniscience are more important to him than his physical tusks and this echoes a fairly well known statement from the Sivi Jardica in which the bodysapfer states that the eye of omniscience is much more valuable to him than his physical eye another example is that Dhammapada verses 9-10 state that these verses are about the ochre robe and who is worthy of wearing the ochre robe these are found in these very verses word for word is found in the Chadunca Jardica the Castle of Jardica and the Dhammapada commentary on these verses which is also a related story there are hundreds of such examples in which where we have these parallel passages that join together at times quite different parts of Buddhist literature to create complex networks of ideas in which any given passage is likely to resonate with several others which creates multiple layers of meaning so that's a bit of an exploration into the textual side of things now let's look at the visual depictions of this family of stories okay so now you all know the story let's get on to the art so the Paul of Signifiers approach following Romanogen I think is really helpful when we start talking about visual jardicas as well and I would say this is one of the reasons I prefer to think in this terms rather than more commonly the idea of intertextuality I think the problem with intertextuality can be that we just get a little bit too focused on the texts and I really want to bring in some of the other manifestations of jardicas into the conversation more commonly the approach of thinking with texts next to art released with jardicas has tended to be thinking in terms of chronology and influence perhaps seeking textual sources for images and using the more readily datable material forms as a way of shoring up the dating of texts which are often more difficult to pin down and the more standard approach to this sort of work as applied to the Chedanta story in particular is well exemplified by Alfred Fusher's 1911 article that I already mentioned he did a great job of identifying details and visual stories that he explored and using these to match the images up with the textual versions and in particular he highlighted a key movement in the story from those versions in which the hunter soars off the tusks with or without the elephant's help to those in which the elephant pulls his own tusks out which Fusher notes that the elephant is also usually shown with only two tusks rather than six and the two depictions in the Ajanta caves which I've put up here in line drawing form just for clarity really so the one on the left is in the older caves and the one on the right is slightly newer are we allowed to say newer for something that's 5th century? it's newer these two images really illustrate that movement that Fusher is talking about so we have in cave 10 what is clearly a six tusked elephant and a hunter with a saw so you can sort of see that up on the top the hunter there with his little hand saw such as I was used for brooning shrubs and he's sawing through this cluster of three tusks I assume there are three on the other side making six total and then we get this movement in the more recent image we have an elephant with just two tusks in fact you can only really see one maybe he's already pulled the other one out and given it to the hunter he's pulling his trunk around this tusk to extract it now Fusher notes that this change reflects a textural shift with the likely innovation traced to Ashwagosha's Sutralankara and he makes a really nice little argument also about how this may help us explain the apparent disagreements between the earlier verses and later prose of the Jatagatabana version of the story not least with respect to the question of how many tusks this elephant actually has now in establishing the shifting textural presentation of the story and its influence on the art Fusher does help us to understand some aspects of the history of this tale and I really appreciate the work that he's done on that I'm just going to be a little bit selfish here and say that he doesn't really ask the questions that interest me when I think about these two images in Ajanta for example why was it decided to depict a story a second time in a neighbouring cave but with different details did people see it as the same story and if they did what did they make of the conflicting presentation did some people view it as a different past life that maybe had some similar aspects a second image seen as a corrective to an earlier erroneous depiction did anybody actually even care apart from perhaps the artists who presumably did care about their work and the patrons what exactly was depicted could anybody even see the stories details in the dark of the caves how actually did users of these caves interact with the images that were painted within them what in some was the point of depicting this story at all let alone twice now I've really acknowledged that many of these questions are completely unanswerable but I would argue that they're still worth asking and I would suggest that this pool of signifiers approach might help us to start to think about some of the things that might be going on so another table for you this one of Indian artistic depictions of the story I've also made you a not terribly elegant map just in case you don't know where these sites are so we're talking about quite a lot of different regions here so we've got the Baruchot and Sancti Stoopers in Manjupurdish we've got Gondaran Art right from up in the north west and I should say I've only got one example on here but I believe that Jason Nealus and his recent project has found a second which I haven't had a chance to to look at yet we've got the Ajanti Caves in Maharashtra the Andhra Pradesh sites and then the Karnagana Hali Stupa which is a relatively recent discovery in Karnataka so we're talking about a pretty impressive range of sites so some interesting things are immediately apparent first of all the association with the idea of respecting men in robes which does seem to be quite an important theme in a lot of the textual versions of the story or textual stories that cluster around this family of stories and that have wider resonances in for example the Dhammapada and some of the other jatikas that Chris was just speaking about just doesn't seem to be important in the art there is no image that I found that really clearly shows that the hunter is dressed in any way that we might recognise as being ochre robes or monastic or pachagabuddalike or anything of that sort and in many it's really clear that he's not a second thing that emerges is the question of whether or not the Bodhisattva helps the hunter seems to be quite important to the art so in almost every depiction we see the elephant helping either by lowering himself to a more accessible height or helping the hunter saw by gripping the saw in his drunk or as we've seen in the Ajanta image actually pulling his own tusks out although that's actually the only example of that that I've found in this early materials now the other thing that has really struck me as I've looked at this material is that many of the depictions, not all of them but many of them seem to be really concerned to show the human queen's regret as a central feature and quite a lot of them also include the gift of a lotus that is the cause of the initial jealousy of the elephant queen and the source of her desire for revenge in her next life so this multi-life animosity of the queen seems to be a real concern in these sites as it is for some of the textual occurrences as well so those scenes were depicted in both of the Ajanta depictions we also can see them here in this depiction of the story across three dome stabs kind of going to hully I'm really grateful to Monica for sharing her line drawings of this material so you can see on the left we have the lotus pools the elephants playing in the lotus pools and the gift and we also have the queen both up here and up here she's fainting at the site of the tusks being presented to her so we get this sort of sense that this multi-life interaction is important for the artists this is also the case in the relief from goly so here again and we even have a separation here between the image of the hunter sewing off the tusk with the elephants help and the presentation of the tusks to the queen she's fainting and the same thing is true of nearby Amoravati for some reason this image has gone peculiar in the journey from Scotland but you can still see the image that's important here so this roundall from Amoravati which is quite well known it's one of Vidya de Hage's selected examples of a synoptic narrative so she maps out the different scenes six different scenes shown within a single image and that's all the adventures of the elephant and the hunter but actually there's a second roundall and again I've taken this line drawing from Shingloff's really helpful set of comparative imagery in his Ajanta handbook and here we see the other half of the story we see the human queen again fainting in the arms of the her human husband as she's being presented by these tusks from this hunter bit of a curious question about how many tusks there are here by the way because in the first image the elephant seems to have a couple of two tusks but then the hunter is carrying four tusks away but then seems to only have two again by the time he presents them to the queen I'm not really sure what's going on there it's an intriguing question so these patterns in terms of how choices were made about which elements of the story to include and which to emphasise into the potential reasons for depicting the story and one of the things that really intrigues me about visual materials is that they tend to offer far less help for us in terms of explicit rationals for why they're including the story so for example the textual sources for this story often tell us quite clearly why they're including the story and there are broadly speaking three categories of reasons so they may be including the story as an illustration of multi-life bonds the dangers of multi-life animosity they may well be telling us the story because it illustrates some great quality of the Bodysanfa though quite which quality varies from text to text there's also this important theme of respect for the robe which I've mentioned is quite prominent in several of the stories and then a fourth theme that we might bring in or fourth reason depending on what we count as a version of this story is this issue of David Utter's ingratitude and or his wearing of robes when he doesn't deserve to do so the images though as I've tried to show really only address the first two so we do get this multi-life message underscored by the frequent inclusion of the gift of the lotus which causes the elephant queen's jealousy and the human queen feinting at the site of the tusks being brought by the hunter the general awesomeness of the Bodysanfa elephant is highlighted in the images that show him helping the hunter being so willing in the gift of his own body part and the other associations just don't seem to be discernable now this is just one story I appreciate that but I do think it's still worth noting that both multi-life karmic bonds and the Buddhist perfection are relevant to our understanding of stupecytes in early India so for example as Jonathan Walters has explored at some length the idea that all devotees are tied to the Buddha through these sorts of complex karmic networks that are often demonstrated in Jataka and Avedan or Apatana literature is important to the role of the rise in stupa devotion and the presence of the Buddha as a perfected being is ensured not only by the relics enshrined in the stupa but also potentially through images that depict him or his relics or his stupas and as Robert Brown argued in the very same volume it's one of my favourite books it's got so much interesting material in there Robert Brown argued in the same volume Jataka images as part of this format at sites they're often inaccessible they're too far overhead you can't see them they're hidden away in dark caves in some places they're even covered over and this suggests that their presence has little relation to narrative readings the depictions of Jataka are not being read as stories rather they're making the Buddha present or manifesting the qualities of Buddhahood in some way so they're functioning as part of this nexus of relic image text that plays out in such fascinating ways throughout the Buddhist world and these two approaches have really influenced my own understanding of Jataka's and visual contexts to bring it back to Jadanta in particular seeing that the aspects of the story that signify multi-life bonds and the Bodhisattva's ability to transcend these through his perfect, compassionate generosity are made so prominent in these depictions might help us to understand how that works how these Jataka's are bringing things to these sacred sites and it might even help us to understand the site with which we began the lecture namely Sanchi which was really what got me first intrigued about this whole set of stories in the beginning because here we have depictions that have been identified as the Jadanta Jataka that feature six dust elephants and yet there's not really any narrative going on so what's going on, there's no multi-life bonds there's no demonstration of generosity patience or compassionate self-sacrifice why do we have these images, what are they doing so the first suggestion I have is that of course the six-tust elephant has wider associations with virtue and power so as Chris noted earlier the elephant that enters Maya's side in her dream and that marks the conception of the Bodhisattva in his final life is often described as having six tusks although I note that it's not generally depicted as such which is an interesting aspect to be very keen to hear if people have examples where it is depicted as six tusked the divine elephant of the god Indrae or chakra is also six tusked in a lot of sources and of course the Bodhisattva as elephant is never going to be an ordinary elephant so this is symbolised by the additional tusks but also by the fact that he's white in colour and as we all know white elephants don't exist so they do so I would suggest that at Sanshi and perhaps elsewhere and indeed the image that Christian found for the seminar on Saturday of a Kashmiri six-tust elephant there's maybe just emblematic of these qualities and virtues and even without the narrative content in fact maybe these images don't depict that you're done to jatica at all but only the central character therein and so very much bringing us back to Brown's assessment that these jatica narratives jatica images are not being read as narratives the notion of sacred place might be important as well so the Sanshi depictions will include this magnificent tree that is described in the Pali jatica as being situated beside Lake Jalanta in the Himalayas at the foot of seven magical mountains the sort of idea of magical landscape is really important to several of the textual versions of the story and this association with the presence of Pacheka Buddhas or of Munis this association with renunciatory bliss maybe is being brought to this site and that may re-resonate with some of the other images that are found at Sanshi of sacred sites stupa worship pilgrimage and the like but finally and let's be honest here I do think it's perfectly possible that the reason we see so many images of stupa at Sanshi might be at least in part because donors and artists really enjoyed elephants who doesn't there are so many elephants depicted at Sanshi in fact you can see some of them here on the edges that are not part of the lintel I very much doubt that any visitors to Sanshi would be able to tell that some of the elephants depicted have six tusks rather than the usual two in fact they probably can't even tell the difference between the tree in the middle of that image and the tree in the middle of this image for example in a different gateway where we just simply have animals worshipping the body tree but that doesn't matter so the whole point I suppose that I'm trying to make here is that it doesn't matter whether they see or whether they recognise the six tusked body set for elephant because the patrons and the artists have ensured that this generous and compassionate elephant paragon of virtue literally watches over the devotees as they come and go through the gateways the next two paragraphs belong to Chris but we decided we wouldn't switch over the microphones again so I'm just going to tell you what's going on reaching some concluding thoughts so this very brief exploration of the Chydant Ajataka has actually barely scratched the surface of the many sources available to us we will be discussing some more of them in Saturday's seminar if you're interested in talking more and if you know of more that we haven't found yet we'd really love to hear from you as well but we hope that even this short reflection on this one story has demonstrated the value of studying textual and visual narratives side by side and also the value of asking rather different questions of them to those that have been quite frequently asked in the past and in particular thinking in terms of Remanigans pool of signifiers can offer us something different to those studies that focus on versions, chronologies, textual sources it helps us to appreciate the many different sorts of parallels and resonances that exist across the vast body of Jataka literature and it's an approach that can be applied across visual and textual culture paying attention to the visual culture helps us to understand not only what is being depicted but also why and this can then inform our understanding of textual narrative too so it becomes a bit of a feedback loop and that's not to suggest that textual and visual narratives always have the same function or focus that's clearly not the case but it is important I think to remember that we can only fully understand the Jataka genre or indeed other genres that exhibit similar pluralities such as Rama literature without taking into account the various forms in which the genre is present and these forms are material and visual as well as textual and so a proper exploration of how they relate to one another requires more than simply trying to identify a textual source for a visual version or a material date for an undatable text and I should note perhaps I should have noted at the beginning that in doing this sort of work I'm not making any pretence at being an art historian myself I very much believe in the idea that scholarship is a team sport and that we should all be working together and I've learned a lot from reading art historical scholarship and also we do have both a little symposium later in the year where we'll be bringing together textual scholars and art scholars to talk about Indian Buddhist narrative but also we've got some art historians advising on the database project I'm not trying to become an art historian but I do hope that it's been an interesting exploration The idea of studying the signifiers and themes within stories is and the insistence of looking across text and art are very much central to the Jatica database project that is at the heart of this research we are going to have to decide what constitutes a parallel story for the purposes of this one particular linking feature in the database but we're also making it possible to search for different aspects so for example you'll be able to look for all the stories that feature a six-tust elephant or the mentioned lake Chedanta all the stories that address David Utter's bad behaviour or false asceticism or the dangers of women spoiler alert there's quite a lot of those or the unparalleled perfection of the Bodhisattva spoiler alert there's fewer of those than you might imagine and the search results will include not only stories and textual sources but also visual Jaticas at a range of early Indian sites so we're still in the early stages of making this available we were hoping to be able to show you a prototype but it's not quite ready but the research possibilities that are thrown up by this project are already starting to present themselves and as Chris mentioned I'm hoping that future rounds of development of the database will be widened to include Chinese, Tibetan traditions including the copious vernacular Jaticas of Southeast Asia but while the Jatica database may have future episodes that's the end of today's snippet of the rich Jatica literature for you today. Thank you very much