The Vessantara Jātaka is not only the most popular of all the Buddhist Jātaka tales, but is important in the tradition as a whole, generally considered by the Theravādin tradition to display the epitome of the Bodhisatta’s perfection of giving (dānapāramī). While most studies have focused on philological approaches, numerous questions as to the text’s structure and how to interpret individual parts within that structure have remained unresolved My study shall employ the theory of ‘chiasmus’ (inverted parallelism) to shed new light on both the key message of the story and also the sub-themes within it.