This scroll painting or tangka depicts the Buddha Sakyamuni surrounded by scenes from his previous lives (Jataka stories). Each episode shows how the future Buddha, as a Bodhisattva, sacrificed himself again and again. Finally he accumulated the spiritual merit that allowed him to become a Buddha. This is probably one from a larger set of tangkas that may have included incidents from the Buddha’s early life. The scenes depicted are taken from ‘The Wish Granting Tree’, a Tibetan translation of the Avadanakalpalata by the 11th century Kashmiri poet Kshemendra.