The Tale of Prince Samuttakote: A Buddhist Epic from Thailand.

• Author: Charney, Michael W.

In The Tale of Prince Samuttakote, Thomas John Hudak offers us a useful translation of a Thai poetic version of the tale of Buddha's previous incarnation as Prince Samutthakhoot, one of the fifty apocryphal jataka tales known as pannyatsachadok. To my knowledge, this is the first time that an English translation of this Thai epic poem has been published. The translation will thus be of great interest and usefulness to scholars of early modern Southeast Asian texts, especially for those who work in Southeast Asian languages other than Thai.

While authorship of the epic is controversial - each of the epic's three parts was written by a different poet, but the first two poets have yet to be identified with absolute certainty - the periodization of the poem's composition is less doubtful. Seventeenth-century poets (one of them may have been King Narai) composed the first two sections of the poem and Prince Paramanuchit Chinorot finished the third and last section in 1849. This periodization is important, because the first two sections of the epic provide the reader with useful information on seventeenth-century court society and culture. The epic version, for example, departs from the jataka story at numerous points, providing new elements, values, and references to the story, which are rooted in the cultural context...