Post 5/?
But: 1st-2nd century CE Buddhist work "Buddhacharita" notably pillaged from Valmeeki, not from Dasharatha Jataka.
Conclusion: even early Buddhists ignored the Dasharatha Jataka as they knew the real source for the Ramayanam. And so too the later Sri Lankan Buddhists, who similarly plagiarised from Valmeeki and ignored the Dasharatha Jataka.
Like the Jains - who also used the Valmeeki Ramayanam a.o.t. Buddhist variants as the source for their plagiarised Jain spins of the same, and so Jains did not fall for the novelty that any of the Buddhist clones on the Ramayanam was the original either (though 1. they shared similar subversionist tendencies and may have found mutual inspiration, and 2. like the Buddhists, they also eventually started peddling their cloned versions about as the "true original" versions, in typical missionary fashion) -
Again: like the Jains, the Buddhists came up with many mutually contradicting Ramayanas too. The Sri Lankan Buddhist version, as mentioned often enough, does not merely introduce Ravana and Lanka, having moved well-past shadowing the Ayodhyakaandam, but has Ravana as the protagonist: Ravana and Lanka are now Buddhists, and much put-upon by Rama, suddenly the antagonist, whereas as per the Dasharatha Jataka Rama was Buddha in a past life.
Clearly the Sri Lankan Buddhists were motivated more by the fact that they realised that Buddhism did not have first claim on Sri Lanka (and hence had to pretend that Buddhism existed on the island during Ramayanam's setting, and so had to invent their own [even later] version) than their caring a jot about the Dasharatha Jataka, despite the Jatakas allegedly being one of the 3 foundational texts of all Buddhism [Dhammapada, Jatakas and I think possibly the Tripitaaka]. That is, Sri Lankan Buddhists knew that the Dasharatha Jataka had plagiarised the Valmeeki Ramayanam, which is why they knew not to take the fib of Rama having been a past life of Buddha seriously, which is why they didn't think twice about plagiarising Valmeeki for a second time but telling a different story to the Jataka AND making Rama the villain now (since they knew he wasn't ever Buddha, that was all just pretence for inculturation in India, which served little purpose in SL where creating a story of a more ancient Buddhist presence on the island was far more important).
In contrast, the Hindoo versions of the Ramayanam stay consistent on all key points. Which itself is proof that Ramayanam is originally and exclusively Hindoo: as only Hindoos are interested in preserving its pristine core, not the terminal-plagiarists (the missionary religions).
If the Dasharatha Jataka had been original, surely the Buddhists would have kept it intact instead of resorting to pillage the Valmeeki Ramayanam for subsequent clones?
To note here is the Sri Lankan Buddhist spin on the Valmeeki Ramayanam isn't the only early subcontinental Buddhist rewrite after the Jataka. Ashvaghosa's Buddhacharita - about Buddha's life, not his past lives - also made sufficient references to Rama. But, while it also restricted itself to Valmeeki's Ayodhyakandam - and in this respect remained consistent with the Buddhist Dasharatha Jataka - it otherwise significantly differs on points, to channel from Valmeeki instead.
Ashvaghosha - once a Hindoo (specifically Brahmana) - who was converted to Buddhism lived in the late 1st century to 2nd century CE. His date is well known as his king was a known Kushana, so people don't question the dating. The work Buddhacharita is therefore - at earliest - from 1st century's CE end, though Ashvaghosha would have been in his teens then (also, it took a while for Buddhism to convert him, so actually the work is far more likely to be from the 2nd century CE).
Important is that Buddhacharita - being about Buddha - is not about Rama, but it refers to Rama in simile: comparing aspects of Buddha's life as parallels to a few aspects from Rama. Clearly the choice of Rama as the comparison was because Rama's life story was more familiar to all (than Buddha's). Which is another indication of how the Buddhist spin in the Jatakas did not come first.
When looking in a translated text and notes for Buddhacharita - translation by some alien in the first half of the 20th century - I can find no mention of Lakshmana or Sita, since the subject involves Buddha and hence the comparisons are to Rama (and with reference to Dasharatha) alone.
+ Buddhacharita mentions Dasharatha being the son of Aja, which is a fact well-mentioned in Valmeeki's Ramayanam, e.g. it appears in a section listing all the ancestors of the Vedic Rama [where Vedic means of the Vedic=Hindoo religion of course]. Hindoo religio-historical texts like to give the ancestors of their heroes all the way up to the "beginning". That Dasharatha's father is called Aja does is not mentioned in Dasharatha Jataka. Ashvaghosha is therefore teasing additional details from Valmeeki Ramayanam. But it also betrays that Ashvaghosha knows the Valmeeki Ramayanam (whereas he doesn't seem to care much for the Dasharatha Jataka, assuming it existed at this point. The early average date for the collection of so-called "Buddhist" Jatakas is entirely owing to the core of the narratives included therein being pre-Jataka and pre-Buddhist.)
+ The son of Aja (Dasharatha) - whose son (Rama) departed to the forest - is described as "the friend of Indra", which is a conclusion taken from the Valmeeki Ramayanam. It is not there in the Dasharatha Jataka
+ More importantly, there is specific mention of both the Rishi son of Urvashi (which this translator correctly assumes to be Vasistha*) and Vamadeva going to see Rama, where the natural mention of Vamadeva is implicit in the Ramayanam and made explicit in the Mahabharatam. Ashvaghosha's explicit mention is again clearly lifted from the Vedic epics, as neither even get a mention in the poorer Dasharatha Jataka clone.
It is that section of the Mahabharatam that retreads the Ramayanam which specifically names Vamadeva: the Mahabharatam mentions Bharata as being accompanied by Vasistha and Vamadeva and Jabali besides as a host of others - including the Queen mothers and ministers - from Ayodhya's court going to see Rama to plead for him to return.
Note that Ramayanam mentions Bharata and Vasishta and Jabali by name (and each of these get one or more chapters of dialogue with Rama, see Ayodhyakandam), and in mentioning that, besides the queen mothers, the ministers and gurus were present, the reference to Vamadeva is implicit: Vamadeva is already known to be of the court. For example, Vamadeva is mentioned with Vasishta in the pattaabhishekam (just as they are both introduced together in the Balakandam, as the 2 Ritviks (let's say Vadyars) in Dasharatha's court besides the 8 or so ministers, though Balakandam is not considered admissable as evidence by non-Hindus). That all the gurus and ministers of the court were present in pleading with Rama to return is obvious from when the Valmeeki Ramayanam refers to the point where they all leave, and it is therefore implicitly the case that Vamadeva (mentioned explicitly by name in MBh) was present.
valmikiramayan.net/utf8/ayodhya/sarga112/ayodhya_112_frame.htm
Vasishta like Agastya is the son of Urvashi as per the Vedam. However it is Vashishta that in Valmeeki Ramayanam has travelled all the way from Ayodhya to Dandaka forest (Agastya did not live in Ayodhya then), and who consequently has several chapters of dialogue with Rama at the end of Ayodhyakanda, in the section where Bharata and various members try to convince or persuade Rama by various means to return home and be their king.
Not knowing which means were used to conclude the Dasharatha Jataka in particular (a.o.t. the Jataka collection/avg Jataka) was earlier to Buddhacharita, it seems to me uncertain whether the Dasharatha Jataka was invented first or the 1st/2nd century CE Ashvaghosha's mere comparisons of Buddha's life of renunciation with that of Rama's exile in Ayodhya in Buddhacharita. I suspect (i.e. speculation, but with some reasoning) the latter was the earlier Buddhist plagiarism of Valmeeki's Ramayanam:
1. Ashvaghosha, despite having converted to Buddhism and turned into a typical zealot, shows no familiarity with Dasharatha Jataka which had equated a cloned Rama to Buddha (as a past life), since if Ashvaghosha had known of it, it is beyond likely that he would have alluded to it instead of merely choosing to draw desperate superficial comparisons between on one hand (Valmeeki's) Rama-and-Dasharatha and 2-specific-courtiers-come-to-plead-with-Rama and on the other hand the Buddha-and-his-father and the-2-courtiers-sent-to-plead-with-Budhda.
2. And I think it is in the Dasharatha Jataka that we see the Buddhists having developed further on Ashvaghosha's notion to compare Rama with Buddha (and Ashvaghosha uses the Valmeeki Ramayanam's Ayodhyakandam, not Dasharatha Jataka) to now declaring that Rama was Buddha's past life.
That is, the direction from Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita to Dasharatha Jataka can be explained straightforwardly, whereas there is no actual connection between the two - other than the common source of Valmeeki Ramayanam - to argue for Dasharatha Jataka to have led to Ashvaghosha's references to Rama in Buddhacharita. It is not impossible that the Dasharatha Jataka was one of the late Jatakas and hence post Ashvaghosha too. Of course, one must allow it to be possible that this Jataka (or perhaps all) were simply unfamiliar to even Buddhists like Ashvaghosha around the 1st/2nd century CE, though Buddhist unfamiliarity with one of the 3 key sources/source texts of Buddhism (Jatakas) seems a bit far-fetched to me - had the Dasharatha Jataka existed in Ashvaghosha's time.
3. Both Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita and the Dasharatha Jataka restrict themselves to plagiarising from the Ayodhyakanda of Valmeeki's Ramayanam for sure, but that could still be argued in support of the Dasharatha Jataka taking the lead from Buddhacharita: Buddhacharita was not required to invoke any other part of the Valmeeki Ramayanam when choosing to make mere comparisons with Buddha, so Ashvaghosha chose to restrict himself to an early part of Rama's forest exile when Rama resisted others' pleadings to return on account of keeping his word to his father. This is offset against the (only *very superficially* similar) Buddha refusing to return to his kingdom when he had renounced it all. (Of course Rama returned to rule as king after keeping his word for the duration of the exile, so that part does not parallel Buddha's life, neither does the abduction of Rama's wife, nor the antagonism of Ravana. Nor, one could argue, the childhood of Rama, who was not coddled in a life of mere wealth, but raised to recognise and be ever aware of his duty and responsibility towards his subjects and to observe the Vaidika Dharma, to discharge his duty to his subjects as the means of the moksha for a king and kshatriya (as opposed to conveniently renouncing it all forever, which may be okay for Buddhist kings but is not done by Hindu Kings: they become ascetics when they retire and have entrusted the kingdom to a trusthworthy child).
It may be that, independently, the Dasharatha Jataka chose to largely limit itself to Ayodhyakanda (even though it has the Rama clone returning to be crowned king and marrying his sister, the Sita clone, which is a separate section in the original Ramayanam of Valmeeki's tradition), or it may be that its restriction was "inspired" by the extent to which Ashvaghosha had bothered to draw comparisons with the Buddha. There is a logical reason for Ashvaghosha to limit himself to Ayodhyakandam: he was drawing comparisons with Buddha's actual life and most of Rama's life didn't remotely resemble that of Buddha. There is no logical reason for the Dasharatha Jataka to restrict itself largely to Ayodhyakandam: it purports to tell the life story of cloned Rama as a previous life of Buddha and so could have told the whole story, but may have been constrained by space (Ramayanam is a large narrative) or to avoid confusion (Buddhism may not have wanted the multiple arcs present in Ramayanam, but may have instead chosen to stick to a single one in order to Buddhistically moralise on it/teach a single lesson) or it simply restricted itself to largely retreading the part of the Valmeeki Ramayanam that Ashvaghosha had taken from. The fact that the Dasharatha Jataka does end hurriedly with little purpose or even little of event in their cloned Rama's life - the 'point' being that he sat in the forest mulling over alleged foreshadowings of Buddhisms perhaps - indicates in which direction the story was borrowed: the original is not likely to be an uneventful story* and it is obvious that Buddhism [as usual] drained it of most of its events to present a short moralistic story, which came to a sudden halt having had no climax and providing no real or new moral messages other than to invert Rama's response to Dasharatha's passing.
* Hindus have no reason to steal anything from others, as theirs is pre-eminently a religion with copious narratives, being an ancient religion. Not to mention that ancient Hindus were famous for penning even great fiction from the ground up, so even in such a situation as might call for fictional entertainment, there would have been no reason for Hindus to take the utterly pointless shadows of short stories from Buddhism or Jainism and try to enlarge these into having some actual content.
But: 1st-2nd century CE Buddhist work "Buddhacharita" notably pillaged from Valmeeki, not from Dasharatha Jataka.
Conclusion: even early Buddhists ignored the Dasharatha Jataka as they knew the real source for the Ramayanam. And so too the later Sri Lankan Buddhists, who similarly plagiarised from Valmeeki and ignored the Dasharatha Jataka.
Quote:And even ancient Buddhists - presumably coming after the Dasharatha Jataka was concocted and included in Buddhist canon - didn't copy from the Dasharatha Jataka, but continued to pilfer from the Valmeeki original of the Hindoos. More proof is barely needed as to whose material is original, nah, when even the Buddhists couldn't 1. keep their story straight for very long and 2. chose to include further details not from the Jataka but from the Valmeeki Ramayanam.
Like the Jains - who also used the Valmeeki Ramayanam a.o.t. Buddhist variants as the source for their plagiarised Jain spins of the same, and so Jains did not fall for the novelty that any of the Buddhist clones on the Ramayanam was the original either (though 1. they shared similar subversionist tendencies and may have found mutual inspiration, and 2. like the Buddhists, they also eventually started peddling their cloned versions about as the "true original" versions, in typical missionary fashion) -
Again: like the Jains, the Buddhists came up with many mutually contradicting Ramayanas too. The Sri Lankan Buddhist version, as mentioned often enough, does not merely introduce Ravana and Lanka, having moved well-past shadowing the Ayodhyakaandam, but has Ravana as the protagonist: Ravana and Lanka are now Buddhists, and much put-upon by Rama, suddenly the antagonist, whereas as per the Dasharatha Jataka Rama was Buddha in a past life.
Clearly the Sri Lankan Buddhists were motivated more by the fact that they realised that Buddhism did not have first claim on Sri Lanka (and hence had to pretend that Buddhism existed on the island during Ramayanam's setting, and so had to invent their own [even later] version) than their caring a jot about the Dasharatha Jataka, despite the Jatakas allegedly being one of the 3 foundational texts of all Buddhism [Dhammapada, Jatakas and I think possibly the Tripitaaka]. That is, Sri Lankan Buddhists knew that the Dasharatha Jataka had plagiarised the Valmeeki Ramayanam, which is why they knew not to take the fib of Rama having been a past life of Buddha seriously, which is why they didn't think twice about plagiarising Valmeeki for a second time but telling a different story to the Jataka AND making Rama the villain now (since they knew he wasn't ever Buddha, that was all just pretence for inculturation in India, which served little purpose in SL where creating a story of a more ancient Buddhist presence on the island was far more important).
In contrast, the Hindoo versions of the Ramayanam stay consistent on all key points. Which itself is proof that Ramayanam is originally and exclusively Hindoo: as only Hindoos are interested in preserving its pristine core, not the terminal-plagiarists (the missionary religions).
If the Dasharatha Jataka had been original, surely the Buddhists would have kept it intact instead of resorting to pillage the Valmeeki Ramayanam for subsequent clones?
To note here is the Sri Lankan Buddhist spin on the Valmeeki Ramayanam isn't the only early subcontinental Buddhist rewrite after the Jataka. Ashvaghosa's Buddhacharita - about Buddha's life, not his past lives - also made sufficient references to Rama. But, while it also restricted itself to Valmeeki's Ayodhyakandam - and in this respect remained consistent with the Buddhist Dasharatha Jataka - it otherwise significantly differs on points, to channel from Valmeeki instead.
Ashvaghosha - once a Hindoo (specifically Brahmana) - who was converted to Buddhism lived in the late 1st century to 2nd century CE. His date is well known as his king was a known Kushana, so people don't question the dating. The work Buddhacharita is therefore - at earliest - from 1st century's CE end, though Ashvaghosha would have been in his teens then (also, it took a while for Buddhism to convert him, so actually the work is far more likely to be from the 2nd century CE).
Important is that Buddhacharita - being about Buddha - is not about Rama, but it refers to Rama in simile: comparing aspects of Buddha's life as parallels to a few aspects from Rama. Clearly the choice of Rama as the comparison was because Rama's life story was more familiar to all (than Buddha's). Which is another indication of how the Buddhist spin in the Jatakas did not come first.
When looking in a translated text and notes for Buddhacharita - translation by some alien in the first half of the 20th century - I can find no mention of Lakshmana or Sita, since the subject involves Buddha and hence the comparisons are to Rama (and with reference to Dasharatha) alone.
+ Buddhacharita mentions Dasharatha being the son of Aja, which is a fact well-mentioned in Valmeeki's Ramayanam, e.g. it appears in a section listing all the ancestors of the Vedic Rama [where Vedic means of the Vedic=Hindoo religion of course]. Hindoo religio-historical texts like to give the ancestors of their heroes all the way up to the "beginning". That Dasharatha's father is called Aja does is not mentioned in Dasharatha Jataka. Ashvaghosha is therefore teasing additional details from Valmeeki Ramayanam. But it also betrays that Ashvaghosha knows the Valmeeki Ramayanam (whereas he doesn't seem to care much for the Dasharatha Jataka, assuming it existed at this point. The early average date for the collection of so-called "Buddhist" Jatakas is entirely owing to the core of the narratives included therein being pre-Jataka and pre-Buddhist.)
+ The son of Aja (Dasharatha) - whose son (Rama) departed to the forest - is described as "the friend of Indra", which is a conclusion taken from the Valmeeki Ramayanam. It is not there in the Dasharatha Jataka
+ More importantly, there is specific mention of both the Rishi son of Urvashi (which this translator correctly assumes to be Vasistha*) and Vamadeva going to see Rama, where the natural mention of Vamadeva is implicit in the Ramayanam and made explicit in the Mahabharatam. Ashvaghosha's explicit mention is again clearly lifted from the Vedic epics, as neither even get a mention in the poorer Dasharatha Jataka clone.
It is that section of the Mahabharatam that retreads the Ramayanam which specifically names Vamadeva: the Mahabharatam mentions Bharata as being accompanied by Vasistha and Vamadeva and Jabali besides as a host of others - including the Queen mothers and ministers - from Ayodhya's court going to see Rama to plead for him to return.
Note that Ramayanam mentions Bharata and Vasishta and Jabali by name (and each of these get one or more chapters of dialogue with Rama, see Ayodhyakandam), and in mentioning that, besides the queen mothers, the ministers and gurus were present, the reference to Vamadeva is implicit: Vamadeva is already known to be of the court. For example, Vamadeva is mentioned with Vasishta in the pattaabhishekam (just as they are both introduced together in the Balakandam, as the 2 Ritviks (let's say Vadyars) in Dasharatha's court besides the 8 or so ministers, though Balakandam is not considered admissable as evidence by non-Hindus). That all the gurus and ministers of the court were present in pleading with Rama to return is obvious from when the Valmeeki Ramayanam refers to the point where they all leave, and it is therefore implicitly the case that Vamadeva (mentioned explicitly by name in MBh) was present.
valmikiramayan.net/utf8/ayodhya/sarga112/ayodhya_112_frame.htm
Quote: [verse 30]
30. atha = then; raaghava vamshavardhanaH = rama; the augmentator of Raghu dynasty; sthiraH = firm; himavaan achalaH iva = as a Himalayan rock; svadharme = (abiding in) his own duty; pratinandya = greeted; tam = those men; aanupuurvyaa = in accord with their rank; guruumshcha = the host of his preceptors; mantriprakR^itiiH = ministers his subjects; tatha = and; anujau = and his brothers; vyasarjayat = and bade farewell.
Rama, the augmentator of Raghu dynasty, being firm as a Himalayan rock in abiding in his own righteousness, greeted those men, in accord with their rank, the host of his preceptors, ministers, subjects and his brothers and bade farewell to all of them.
Vasishta like Agastya is the son of Urvashi as per the Vedam. However it is Vashishta that in Valmeeki Ramayanam has travelled all the way from Ayodhya to Dandaka forest (Agastya did not live in Ayodhya then), and who consequently has several chapters of dialogue with Rama at the end of Ayodhyakanda, in the section where Bharata and various members try to convince or persuade Rama by various means to return home and be their king.
Quote:valmikiramayan.net/utf8/ayodhya/ayodhya_contents.htm
107: Rama tells Bharata about Dasaratha's promise of kingdom sarga/chapter
108: Jabali tries to persuade Rama to accept the Kingdom sarga/chapter
109: Rama refutes the atheistic arguments of Jabali sarga/chapter
110: Vasishta gives details of the creation of the world to Sri Rama. sarga/chapter
111: Vashishta urges Rama to grant the prayer of Bharata sarga/chapter
112: The sages requests Bharata to accept Rama's words sarga/chapter
113: Keeping Rama's sandals on his head, Bharata ascends his chariot sarga/chapter
Not knowing which means were used to conclude the Dasharatha Jataka in particular (a.o.t. the Jataka collection/avg Jataka) was earlier to Buddhacharita, it seems to me uncertain whether the Dasharatha Jataka was invented first or the 1st/2nd century CE Ashvaghosha's mere comparisons of Buddha's life of renunciation with that of Rama's exile in Ayodhya in Buddhacharita. I suspect (i.e. speculation, but with some reasoning) the latter was the earlier Buddhist plagiarism of Valmeeki's Ramayanam:
1. Ashvaghosha, despite having converted to Buddhism and turned into a typical zealot, shows no familiarity with Dasharatha Jataka which had equated a cloned Rama to Buddha (as a past life), since if Ashvaghosha had known of it, it is beyond likely that he would have alluded to it instead of merely choosing to draw desperate superficial comparisons between on one hand (Valmeeki's) Rama-and-Dasharatha and 2-specific-courtiers-come-to-plead-with-Rama and on the other hand the Buddha-and-his-father and the-2-courtiers-sent-to-plead-with-Budhda.
2. And I think it is in the Dasharatha Jataka that we see the Buddhists having developed further on Ashvaghosha's notion to compare Rama with Buddha (and Ashvaghosha uses the Valmeeki Ramayanam's Ayodhyakandam, not Dasharatha Jataka) to now declaring that Rama was Buddha's past life.
That is, the direction from Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita to Dasharatha Jataka can be explained straightforwardly, whereas there is no actual connection between the two - other than the common source of Valmeeki Ramayanam - to argue for Dasharatha Jataka to have led to Ashvaghosha's references to Rama in Buddhacharita. It is not impossible that the Dasharatha Jataka was one of the late Jatakas and hence post Ashvaghosha too. Of course, one must allow it to be possible that this Jataka (or perhaps all) were simply unfamiliar to even Buddhists like Ashvaghosha around the 1st/2nd century CE, though Buddhist unfamiliarity with one of the 3 key sources/source texts of Buddhism (Jatakas) seems a bit far-fetched to me - had the Dasharatha Jataka existed in Ashvaghosha's time.
3. Both Ashvaghosha's Buddhacharita and the Dasharatha Jataka restrict themselves to plagiarising from the Ayodhyakanda of Valmeeki's Ramayanam for sure, but that could still be argued in support of the Dasharatha Jataka taking the lead from Buddhacharita: Buddhacharita was not required to invoke any other part of the Valmeeki Ramayanam when choosing to make mere comparisons with Buddha, so Ashvaghosha chose to restrict himself to an early part of Rama's forest exile when Rama resisted others' pleadings to return on account of keeping his word to his father. This is offset against the (only *very superficially* similar) Buddha refusing to return to his kingdom when he had renounced it all. (Of course Rama returned to rule as king after keeping his word for the duration of the exile, so that part does not parallel Buddha's life, neither does the abduction of Rama's wife, nor the antagonism of Ravana. Nor, one could argue, the childhood of Rama, who was not coddled in a life of mere wealth, but raised to recognise and be ever aware of his duty and responsibility towards his subjects and to observe the Vaidika Dharma, to discharge his duty to his subjects as the means of the moksha for a king and kshatriya (as opposed to conveniently renouncing it all forever, which may be okay for Buddhist kings but is not done by Hindu Kings: they become ascetics when they retire and have entrusted the kingdom to a trusthworthy child).
It may be that, independently, the Dasharatha Jataka chose to largely limit itself to Ayodhyakanda (even though it has the Rama clone returning to be crowned king and marrying his sister, the Sita clone, which is a separate section in the original Ramayanam of Valmeeki's tradition), or it may be that its restriction was "inspired" by the extent to which Ashvaghosha had bothered to draw comparisons with the Buddha. There is a logical reason for Ashvaghosha to limit himself to Ayodhyakandam: he was drawing comparisons with Buddha's actual life and most of Rama's life didn't remotely resemble that of Buddha. There is no logical reason for the Dasharatha Jataka to restrict itself largely to Ayodhyakandam: it purports to tell the life story of cloned Rama as a previous life of Buddha and so could have told the whole story, but may have been constrained by space (Ramayanam is a large narrative) or to avoid confusion (Buddhism may not have wanted the multiple arcs present in Ramayanam, but may have instead chosen to stick to a single one in order to Buddhistically moralise on it/teach a single lesson) or it simply restricted itself to largely retreading the part of the Valmeeki Ramayanam that Ashvaghosha had taken from. The fact that the Dasharatha Jataka does end hurriedly with little purpose or even little of event in their cloned Rama's life - the 'point' being that he sat in the forest mulling over alleged foreshadowings of Buddhisms perhaps - indicates in which direction the story was borrowed: the original is not likely to be an uneventful story* and it is obvious that Buddhism [as usual] drained it of most of its events to present a short moralistic story, which came to a sudden halt having had no climax and providing no real or new moral messages other than to invert Rama's response to Dasharatha's passing.
* Hindus have no reason to steal anything from others, as theirs is pre-eminently a religion with copious narratives, being an ancient religion. Not to mention that ancient Hindus were famous for penning even great fiction from the ground up, so even in such a situation as might call for fictional entertainment, there would have been no reason for Hindus to take the utterly pointless shadows of short stories from Buddhism or Jainism and try to enlarge these into having some actual content.