As a young girl, I spent many dark nights reading The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1974), a double set of Grimm’s fairy tales illustrated by Maurice Sendak. I don’t believe my father read them before he gave them to me. If he had, he might have thought twice before setting me free into those violent stories of kidnapping, neglect, cannibalism, and other darknesses that had never before occurred to me. Perhaps that’s why, decades later, when I was searching for books to stock the library of the Buddhist elementary school I was starting, I instinctively rejected the most obvious choice—in a sense the only choice—the stories everyone assumed I would use . . . the famous Jataka Tales.
After paging through several editions, I made my decision: no Jataka, no way.
