A Sri Lankan psychiatrist reads the Jataka tales as case material. D. V. J. Harischandra, who has taught psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ruhuna in Galle and worked as a consultant psychiatrist at the Teaching Hospital there, takes the stories of the Buddha's previous lives and sets them beside the clinical categories of his own profession — suicidal thinking, jealousy, depression, intellectual disability. The result is a book written in English by a practising clinician for readers who come to the Jataka from either direction: those who know the stories well and have never thought of them in these terms, and those trained in mental health who have not read them at all.
The Jataka corpus is enormous, and Harischandra works through particular tales rather than summarising the whole. The Ummagga Jataka is among those discussed, as is the story of Mattakundali. The approach throughout is to look at what the narratives show of how people behave under strain — how grief, envy and despair are depicted, and how the stories handle characters whose minds are not working as others expect.
A second strand of the book concerns the use of the stories in treatment. Harischandra writes about therapeutic applications of the Jataka, including a group at the Galle Teaching Hospital in which patients act out scenes from the tales. This is drawn from his own working environment rather than from the literature of other countries, which gives the discussion a local specificity unusual in writing that brings Buddhist material together with psychiatry.
The foreword is by Dr D. N. Atukorala.
Books that put Buddhism and modern psychology in the same frame are common enough; most are written from outside the tradition and from outside clinical practice. This one is written from inside both. It will suit readers in psychiatry, psychology, counselling and social work in Sri Lanka and elsewhere who want to see how a familiar body of narrative looks to a clinician, and readers of the Jataka who are curious about what a psychiatric reading adds. Students of Buddhist literature may find the angle a useful corrective to purely doctrinal or literary commentary. No background in medicine is assumed, and the tales themselves carry the argument.
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