First off, I was struck by the similarity between the story "The Hare That Ran Away" and Chicken Little. From what I can tell, they appear identical. Interestingly, when I looked up more information on Wikipedia, the Henny Penny article focused on fairly recent Western textual sources, with a brief mention of the ancient Jataka tale but no bridge between the 2500-year-old Jataka source and the ninteenth-century European texts. The stories are so similar that I would think they have to be linked somehow -- how odd (and intriguing) that there's such a long gap between the source materials!
I also found it interesting to look at the language Shedlock uses. The "by hook or by crook" phrase used by the crocodile in the second story and the thee's and thou's in other tales certainly are not direct translations from the original language(s) of the Jataka tales. It's always fun to see how people opt to translate sayings and dialogue forms, trying to adapt them to a different culture, not just a different language.
And then there is the similarity of the fable structure itself. Most people today are probably most familiar with Aesop's fables, but the tradition of this style of moral storytelling (and often the plots of the stories themselves) seems cross-cultural: La Fontaine's stories in French, components of African storytelling, the myriad collections from India and other Eastern traditions, and more. It raises the question of how such similarities arose. Did a fable tradition start in one place and spread out from there? Did these traditions arise independently in multiple areas? Or is the similarity in part influenced by translation, by translators taking tales from other cultures and tweaking them to our own society as they translate them? What makes these same motifs resonate across diverse cultures to create very similar, long-lived traditions?
the Tortoise and the Scorpion, from the fables of Bidpai
Mirza Rahim, 1847
source: Wikimedia Commons
I am so glad you looked at the Jatakas, Susanna! The Jatakas and Panchatantra are closely related traditions with a lot of overlap. There are surely some Jataka-Panchatantra stories that traveled to Greece in ancient times (lots of Greece-India contact, esp. because of Alexander the Great and the Greek kingdoms of India), then the Panchatantra was adapted into Arabic and Persian versions which spread throughout the Middle East and then to Europe (especially via the Hebrew and Arabic writers of medieval Spain), and then another dose of connectedness in the Renaissance and early modern periods when literary writers were enamored of eastern sources (e.g. La Fontaine whom you mention). If you are interested in this type of thing, then definitely do your project for this class on the Jatakas and/or Panchatantra: I can promise you will be amazed by the things you are able to connect and discover!
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