As for the French Indian & Buddhist Studies, a relevant discussion, continuing Madeleine Biardeau's work on the the Epics (especially of 1999 & 2002), you may find in Jean-Pierre Osier's long introduction to his translation of the Vessantarajataka (Paris: Cerf, 2010).

In a 2009 study of earthquakes in Indian Buddhist sources and a forthcoming second part which would benefit from the recent issue of RoSA on this topic, I compare several stock expressions relating earthquakes to heroes (birth, death, exceptional agency, etc.), which perhaps underline polemics of cosmic status in Buddhist and Hindu sources. In his A Bull of a Man (Harvard 2009), John Powers discussed bold expressions like rsabha, jinarsabha u. Verw.: however, all these seem to be much more frequent in the Epics than in Buddhist early sources. A forthcoming French book by Ronan Moreau will also show the functioning of animal comparison in the Epics, which have many echoes in Pali/BH Sanskrit/Gandhari sources.

2011/9/7 Ulrich T. Kragh <utkragh@hum.ku.dk>

James Hegarty wrote:
>I am looking for explicitly comparative studies relating

>to Sanskrit and Pali sources (preferably of narrative materials) ...

You may see my article "Of Similes and Metaphors in Buddhist Philosophical Literature - Poetic Semblance through Mythic Allusion" in Bulletin of SOAS 73.3, 2010, pp. 479-502.

There you will find some cross-references between Buddhist Pali/Sanskrit and Hindu literature concerning the trope of the hamsarajan-bird (the article's general topic) and, more specifically, in fn. 21 you will find parallels listed for the various Buddhist and Hindu stories of a king's recognition of a bastard son with or without the plot device of a signet-rign (as, e.g., seen in Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntala).

Sincerely,
Tim

Dr. Ulrich Timme Kragh
Gonda Fellow, IIAS, Leiden