The Jātaka tales are a voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of Gautama Buddha. These are the stories that tell about the previous lives of the Buddha, in both human and animal form. The future Buddha may appear in them as a king, an outcast, a god, an elephant—but, in whatever form, he exhibits some virtue that the tale thereby inculcates.
In Theravada Buddhism, the Jatakas are a textual division of the Pāli Canon, included in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka. The term Jātaka may also refer to a traditional commentary on this book.
The Jatakas were originally amongst the earliest Buddhist literature, with metrical analysis methods dating their average contents to around the 4th century BCE. The Mahāsāṃghika Caitika sects from the Āndhra region took the Jatakas as canonical literature and are known to have rejected some of the Theravada Jatakas which dated past the time of King Ashoka. The Caitikas claimed that their own Jatakas represented the original collection before the Buddhist tradition split into various lineages.