TRÜBNER’S
ORIENTAL SERIES.
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO. LTD
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1906.
[All rights reserved.]
CONTENTS.
[vii]
INTRODUCTION.
In an Appendix to his “Buddhism in Tibet,” Dr. Emil Schlagintweit has given “An alphabetical list of the books and memoirs connected with Buddhism.” Although not completely exhaustive, it occupies thirty-five pages, and contains references to more than a hundred separate works, and a much larger number of essays and other literary articles. Of those books and articles, the titles of about sixty allude to Tibet. To them may be referred readers who wish for detailed information about that country, its literature, and its religion. All that it is proposed to do here is to say a few words about the Tibetan work from which have been extracted the tales contained in the present volume; to give a short account of the enthusiastic Hungarian scholar, Csoma Körösi, who had so much to do with making that work known to Europe; and to call attention to any features which the stories now before us may have in common with European folk-tales. To do more, without merely repeating what has been already said, would require a rare amount of special knowledge; and it may safely be asserted that remarks about Buddhism, made by writers who do not possess such knowledge, are seldom of signal value.
The tales contained in the sacred books of Tibet, it may be as well to remark at the outset, appear to have little that is specially Tibetan about them except their language. Stories possessing characteristic features and suffused with local colour may possibly live in the memories of the [viii]natives of that region of lofty and bleak table-lands, with which so few Europeans have had an opportunity of becoming familiar. But the legends and fables which the late Professor Schiefner has translated from the Kah-gyur are merely Tibetan versions of Sanskrit writings. No mention is made in them of those peculiarities of Tibetan Buddhism which have most struck the fancy of foreign observers. They never allude to the rosary of 108 beads which every Tibetan carries, “that he may keep a reckoning of his good words, which supply to him the place of good deeds;” the praying wheels, “those curious machines which, filled with prayers, or charms, or passages from holy books, stand in the towns in every open place, are placed beside the footpaths and the roads, revolve in every stream, and even (by the help of sails like those of windmills) are turned by every breeze which blows o’er the thrice-sacred valleys of Tibet;” the “Trees of the Law,” the lofty flagstaffs from which flutter banners emblazoned with the sacred words, “Ah! the jewel is in the lotus,” the turning of which towards heaven by the wind counts as the utterance of a prayer capable of bringing down blessings upon the whole country-side; or of that Lamaism which “bears outwardly, at least, a strong resemblance to Romanism, in spite of the essential difference of its teachings and of its mode of thought.”1 There is, therefore, no present need to dwell at length upon the land into which the legends and doctrines were transplanted which had previously flourished on Indian soil, or the people by whom they have been religiously preserved, but whose actions and thoughts they do not by any means fully represent. “At the present day,” says Mr. Rhys Davids, “the Buddhism of Nepāl and Tibet differs from the Buddhism of Ceylon as much as the Christianity of Rome or of Moscow differs from that of Scotland or Wales. But,” he proceeds to say, “the history of Buddhism [ix]from its commencement to its close is an epitome of the religious history of mankind. And we have not solved the problem of Buddhism when we have understood the faith of the early Buddhists. It is in this respect that the study of later Buddhism in Ceylon, Burma, and Siam, in Nepāl and in Tibet, in China, Mongolia, and Japan, is only second in importance to the study of early Buddhism.”2
With regard to the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, Emil Schlagintweit3 remarks that “the early history is involved in darkness and myth.” Sanang Setsen, in his “History of the East Mongols,”4 says that during the reign of King Hlatotori, who came to the throne in 367 A.D., four objects descended from heaven one day and lighted upon the golden terrace of his palace, “namely, the image of two hands in the position of prayer, a golden pyramid-temple an ell high, a small coffer with a gem marked with the six fundamental syllables (Om-ma-ni-pad-mè-hûm), and the manual called Szamadok.”5 As the king did not understand the nature of the holy objects, he ordered them to be locked up in his treasury. While they lay there, “misfortune came upon the king. If children were born, they came into the world blind; fruits and grain came to nothing; cattle plague, famine, and pestilence prevailed; and of unavoidable misery was there much.” But after forty years had passed, there came five strangers to the king and said, “Great king, how couldst thou let these objects, so mystic and powerful, be cast into the treasury?” Having thus spoken, they [x]suddenly disappeared. Therefore the king ordered the holy objects to be brought forth from the treasury, and to be attached to the points of standards, and treated with the utmost respect and reverence. After that all went well: the king became prosperous and long-lived, children were born beautiful, famine and pestilence came to an end, and in their place appeared happiness and welfare. With the date of this event Sanang Setsen connects the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet; but according to Tibetan historians, says Schlagintweit, “the earliest period of the propagation of Buddhism, which reached down till the end of the tenth century A.D., begins with King Srongtsan Gampo, who was born in the year 617 A.D., and died 698.” This king is said to have sent a mission to India in the year 632 A.D., the result of which was the invention of a Tibetan alphabet, based upon Devanāgari characters, and the translation into Tibetan of Indian sacred books. In his introduction of Buddhism into his kingdom he is said to have been “most energetically supported by his two wives, one of whom was a Nepalese, the other a Chinese princess. Both of them, who throughout their lifetime proved most faithful votaries to the faith of Buddha, are worshipped either under the general name of Dolma (in Sanskrit Tārā), or under the respective names of Dolkar and Doljang.” After making considerable progress during the reign of this monarch, the new religion lost ground under his immediate successors. “But under one of them, Thisrong de tsan, … Buddhism began to revive, owing to the useful regulations proclaimed by this king. He it was who successfully crushed an attempt made by the chiefs during his minority to suppress the new creed, and it is principally due to him that the Buddhist faith became henceforth permanently established.”
Towards the end of the ninth century, continues Schlagintweit, Buddhism was strongly opposed by a ruler who “commanded all temples and monasteries to be demolished, the images to be destroyed, and the sacred books to be [xi]burnt;” and his son and successor is also said to have died “without religion;” but his grandson was favourably inclined towards Buddhism, and rebuilt eight temples. “With this period we have to connect ‘the second propagation of Buddhism;’ it received, especially from the year 971 A.D., a powerful impetus from the joint endeavours of the returned Tibetan priests (who had fled the country under the preceding kings), and of the learned Indian priest Pandita Atisha and his pupil Brom-ston. Shortly before Atisha came to Tibet, 1041 A.D., the Kāla Chakra doctrine, or Tantrika mysticism, was introduced into Tibet, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries many Indian refugees settled in the country, who greatly assisted the Tibetans in the translation of Sanskrit books.” It is probably from this period that the Kah-gyur dates.
In the fourteenth century arose the reformer Tsonkhapa, who “imposed upon himself the difficult task of uniting and reconciling the dialectical and mystical schools which Tibetan Buddhism had brought forth, and also of eradicating the abuses gradually introduced by the priests.” Tradition asserts that he “had some intercourse with a stranger from the West, who was remarkable for a long nose. Huc believes this stranger to have been a European missionary, and connects the resemblance of the religious service in Tibet to the Roman Catholic ritual with the information which Tsonkhapa might have received from this Roman Catholic priest. We are not yet able to decide the question as to how far Buddhism may have borrowed from Christianity; but the rites of the Buddhists enumerated by the French missionary can for the most part either be traced back to institutions peculiar to Buddhism, or they have sprung up in periods posterior to Tsonkhapa.”6
Mr. Rhys Davids has remarked that, “As in India, after the expulsion of Buddhism, the degrading worship of Śiva and his dusky bride had been incorporated into [xii]Brahmanism from the wild and savage devil-worship of the dark non-Aryan tribes, so as pure Buddhism died away in the North, the Tantra system, a mixture of magic and witchcraft and Śiva-worship, was incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism.”7 Of this change for the worse, evidence about which there can be no mistake is supplied by the Tibetan sacred books. Dr. Malan, who has made himself acquainted with the contents of some of their volumes in the original, says,8 “There are passages of great beauty and great good sense, the most abstruse metaphysics, and the most absurd and incredible stories; yet not worse than those told in the Talmud, which equal or even surpass them in absurdity.”
On New Year’s day 1820, a traveller started from Bucharest on an adventurous journey towards the East. His name was Alexander Csoma Körösi (or de Körös),9 and he was one of the sons of a Szekler military family of Eger-patak, in the Transylvanian circle of Hungary. In 1799, when he seems to have been about nine years old,10 he was sent to the Protestant College at Nagy-Enyed, where he studied for many years with the idea of taking orders. In 1815 he was sent to Germany, and there he studied for three years, chiefly at the University of Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of the celebrated Orientalist Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. After his return from Germany, he spent the greater part of the year 1819 in studying various Slavonic dialects, first at Temesvar in Lower Hungary, then at Agram in Croatia. But he soon resolved to apply himself to less-known tongues. [xiii]
“Among other liberal pursuits,” he wrote in 1825,11 “my favourite studies were philology, geography, and history. Although my ecclesiastical studies had prepared me for an honourable employment in my native country, yet my inclination for the studies above-mentioned induced me to seek a wider field for their future cultivation. As my parents were dead, and my only brother did not want my assistance, I resolved to leave my native country and to come towards the East, and, by some means or other procuring subsistence, to devote my whole life to researches which may be afterwards useful in general to the learned world of Europe, and in particular may illustrate some obscure facts in ancient history.” Having no hope, he says, of obtaining “an imperial passport” for his journey, he procured “a printed Hungarian passport at Nagy-Enyed, to come on some pretended business to Bucharest,” intending to study Turkish there and then to go on to Constantinople. But he could obtain neither instruction in Turkish nor the means of going direct to Constantinople. So he set forth from Bucharest on the 1st of January 1820, and travelled with some Bulgarian companions to Philippopolis. Tidings of plague forced him to turn aside to the coast of the Archipelago, whence he sailed in a Greek ship to Alexandria. Driven from that city by the plague, he made his way by sea to the coast of Syria, and thence on foot to Aleppo. From that city he proceeded to Bagdad, which he reached in July, travelling part of the way on foot, “with different caravans from various places, in an Asiatic dress,” and the rest “by water on a raft.” In September he left Bagdad, travelling in European costume on horseback with a caravan, and in the middle of next month he arrived at Teheran. In the capital of Persia he spent four months. In March 1821 he again started with a caravan, travelling [xiv]as an Armenian, and, after a stay of six months in Khorasán, arrived in the middle of November at Bokhara. There he intended to pass the winter; but at the end of five days, “affrighted by frequent exaggerated reports of the approach of a numerous Russian army,” he travelled with a caravan to Kabul, where he arrived early in January 1822. At the end of a fortnight he again set out with a caravan. Making acquaintance on the way with Runjeet Sing’s French officers, Generals Allard and Ventura, he accompanied them to Lahore. By their aid he obtained permission to enter Kashmir, with the intention of proceeding to Yarkand; but finding that the road was “very difficult, expensive, and dangerous for a Christian,” he set out from Leh in Ladak, the farthest point he reached, to return to Lahore. On his way back, near the Kashmir frontier, he met Mr. Moorcroft and returned with him to Leh. There Mr. Moorcroft lent him the “Alphabetum Tibetanum,” the ponderous work published at Rome in 1762, compiled by Father Antonio Agostino Giorgi out of the materials sent from Tibet by the Capuchin Friars. Its perusal induced him to stay for some time at Leh in order to study Tibetan, profiting by “the conversation and instruction of an intelligent person, who was well acquainted with the Tibetan and Persian languages.” During the winter, which he spent at Kashmir, he became so interested in Tibetan that he determined to devote himself to its study, so as to be able to “penetrate into those numerous and highly interesting volumes which are to be found in every large monastery.” He communicated his ideas to Mr. Moorcroft, who fully approved of his plan, and provided him with money and official recommendations. Starting afresh from Kashmir in May 1823, he reached Leh in the beginning of June. From that city, he says, “travelling in a south-westerly direction, I arrived on the ninth day at Yangla, and from the 20th of June 1823 to the 22d of October 1824 I sojourned in Zanskár (the most south-western province of Ladákh), [xv]where I applied myself to the Tibetan literature, assisted by the Lámá.”
With the approach of winter he left Zanskár, and towards the end of November 1824 arrived at Sabathú. In the letter which he wrote during his stay there, in January 1825, he says, “At my first entrance to the British Indian territory, I was fully persuaded I should be received as a friend by the Government.” Nor was he disappointed. As at Bagdad and Teheran, so in India was the Hungarian pilgrim welcomed and assisted by the British authorities. In 1826 he seems (says Dr. Archibald Campbell12) to have paid a second visit to Western Tibet, and to have continued “to study in the monasteries of that country, living in the poorest possible manner,” till 1831. In the autumn of that year Dr. Campbell met him at Simla, “dressed in a coarse blue cloth loose gown, extending to his heels, and a small cloth cap of the same material. He wore a grizzly beard, shunned the society of Europeans, and passed his whole time in study.” It is much to be regretted that he has left no record of his residence in the monasteries in which he passed so long a time, in one of which, “with the thermometer below zero for more than four months, he was precluded by the severity of the weather from stirring out of a room nine feet square. Yet in this situation he read from morning till evening without a fire, the ground forming his bed, and the walls of the building his protection against the rigours of the climate, and still he collected and arranged forty thousand words in the language of Tibet, and nearly completed his Dictionary and Grammar.”13 Day after day, says M. Pavie,14 he would sit in a wretched hut at the door of a monastery, reading [xvi]aloud Buddhistic works with a Lama by his side. When a page was finished, the two readers would nudge each other’s elbows. The question was which of them was to turn over the leaf, thereby exposing his hand for the moment, unprotected by the long-furred sleeve, to the risk of being frost-bitten.
In May 1832 he went to Calcutta, where he met with great kindness from many scholars, especially Professor H. H. Wilson and Mr. James Prinsep, and, after a time, he was appointed assistant-librarian to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. At Calcutta he spent many years, and there his two principal works, the “Essay Towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English,”15 and the “Grammar of the Tibetan Language,” were brought out at the expense of Government in 1834. “In the beginning of 1836,” says Dr. Campbell, “his anxiety to visit Lassa induced him to leave Calcutta for Titalya, in the hope of accomplishing his design through Bootan, Sikim, or Nipal.” Of his life in Titalya, where he seems to have spent more than a year, some account is given by Colonel G. W. A. Lloyd, who says, “He would not remain in my house, as he thought his eating and living with me would cause him to be deprived of the familiarity and society of the natives, with whom it was his wish to be colloquially intimate, and I therefore got him a common native hut, and made it as comfortable as I could for him, but still he seemed to me to be miserably off. I also got him a servant, to whom he paid three or four rupees a month, and his living did not cost him more than four more.”
Towards the end of 183716 he returned to Calcutta. I have been favoured by a very accomplished linguist, the Rev. S. C. Malan, D.D., Rector of Broadwindsor, Dorset, [xvii]who was at one time secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, with an account of his acquaintance with Csoma Körösi during the Hungarian scholar’s second residence at Calcutta. Dr. Malan writes as follows:—
“As regards Csoma de Körös, I never think of him without interest and gratitude. I had heard of him, and seen his Tibetan Grammar and Dictionary before leaving England. And one thing that used to make me think a five months’ voyage interminable was my longing to become acquainted with one who had prepared the way for the acquisition of a language of Asia, thought until then almost mythical. For neither Father Georgi’s nor Abel Rémusat’s treatises went very far to clear the mystery.
“One of my early visits, then, was to the Asiatic Society’s house [in Calcutta], where Csoma lived as under-librarian.17 I found him a man of middle stature, of somewhat strange expression and features, much weather-beaten from his travels, but kind, amiable, and willing to impart all he knew. He was, however, very shy, and extremely disinterested. Although I had to cross the river to come to him, I requested him at once to give me one lesson a week in Tibetan, and he agreed to do so most readily. But I could not make him consent to take any money. He told me to come as often as I liked, on the condition that his teaching was to be free, for the pleasure and love of it. Of course this prevented me from visiting him as frequently as I should otherwise have done, yet I went to him for a lesson as often as I dared to do so. Although I frequently asked him to come and stay in my house for change of air, I never could prevail upon him to come, owing to his shyness and retiring habits. But as I happened to be the only person who was troubling himself about Tibetan, he and I became very good friends during the whole of my (alas! too short) stay in India. And [xviii]when we parted he gave me the whole of his Tibetan books, some thirty volumes. I value such relics highly, and still use the same volume, containing his Grammar and Dictionary, which I used to turn over with him.”
Speaking of Csoma Körösi’s literary life at Calcutta, M. Pavie says, in the article which has already been cited, “These labours occupied his time for the space of nine years. He had turned his study into a sort of cell, from which he scarcely ever emerged, except to walk up and down the long neighbouring galleries. It was there that, during our stay in Bengal, we very frequently saw him, absorbed in a dreamy meditation, smiling at his own thoughts, as silent as the Brahmans who were copying Sanskrit texts. He had forgotten Europe to live amid the clouds of ancient Asia.”
Early in 1842 Csoma Körösi left Calcutta, with the intention of revisiting Tibet, and of making his way, if possible, to Lhasa, where he was in hopes of discovering rich stores of Tibetan literature as yet unknown to the learned world. On the 24th of March he arrived at Darjíling, in Nepal, where the superintendent of the station, Dr. Archibald Campbell, did all he could to further his views. But on the 6th of April he was attacked by fever, and on the 11th he died, a victim, as Professor Max Müller has said, “to his heroic devotion to the study of ancient languages and religions.” His wants, apart from literary requirements, appear to have been as few as those of any monk, whether Christian or Buddhistic. “His effects,” says Dr. Campbell, “consisted of four boxes of books and papers, the suit of blue clothes which he always wore, and in which he died, a few shirts, and one cooking-pot. His food was confined to tea, of which he was very fond, and plain boiled rice, of which he ate very little. On a mat on the floor, with a box of books on the four sides, he sat, ate, slept, and studied; never undressed at night, and rarely went out during the day. He never drank wine or spirits, or used tobacco or other stimulants.” [xix]
A few days before he died he gave Dr. Campbell “a rapid summary of the manner in which he believed his native land was possessed by the original ‘Huns,’ and his reasons for tracing them to Central or Eastern Asia.” Dr. Campbell gathered from his conversation that “all his hopes of attaining the object of the long and laborious search were centred in the discovery of the country of the ‘Yoogars.’ This land he believed to be to the east and north of Lassa and the province of Kham, and on the northern confines of China; to reach it was the goal of his most ardent wishes, and there he fully expected to find the tribes he had hitherto sought in vain.” On the way he hoped to make great literary discoveries, and he would dilate in the most enthusiastic manner “on the delight he expected to derive from coming in contact with some of the learned men of the East (Lassa), as the Lamas of Ladakh and Kānsun, with whom alone he had previous communion, were confessedly inferior in learning to those of Eastern Tibet.” He was generally reticent about the benefits which scholars might derive from his contemplated journey, but “What would Hodgson, Turnour, and some of the philosophers of Europe not give to be in my place when I get to Lassa!” was a frequent exclamation of his during his conversations with Dr. Campbell before his illness.
The Asiatic Society of Bengal at once placed a thousand rupees at the disposal of Dr. Campbell for the erection of a monument above the remains of the Hungarian pilgrim. And the Government of India has since given instructions that the grave of this genuine and disinterested scholar shall be for all time placed under the care of the British Resident at Darjíling.18
To the Hungarian enthusiast may be fairly applied, with a slight change, the words which Professor Max [xx]Müller19 has written with reference to Hiouen-thsang, the Chinese pilgrim, who spent so much time “quietly pursuing among strangers, within the bleak walls of the cell of a Buddhist college, the study of a foreign language,” that there was “something in his life and the work of his life that places him by right among the heroes of Greece, the martyrs of Rome, the knights of the Crusades, the explorers of the Arctic regions; something that makes it a duty to inscribe his name on the roll of the worthies of the human race.”
Although the language and literature of Tibet occupied so much of Csoma Körösi’s time and thoughts, yet the main object of his life was to work out the mysterious problem as to the origin of the Hungarian nation. According to M. Jules Mohl, it was a remark of Blumenbach’s about the possibility of discovering in Asia the original home of the prehistoric ancestors of the Magyars, which first turned the attention to the subject of the young Hungarian, who was then studying medicine at Göttingen. According to Hunfalvy,20 his fancy may have been fired by De Guignes’s opinion, published a little before 1815, that the Huns had wandered from the western borders of the Chinese empire, first to the neighbourhood of the Volga, and then on to Pannonia. But the fact of Csoma Körösi being a Szekler by birth, says Hunfalvy, is regarded as one of the reasons for his looking for the origin of his nation and language in the seat of the ancient Huns. For the Hungarian chronicles had for centuries nourished in the Szeklers the belief that they were the direct descendants of the Huns of Attila. In a letter which he wrote home during his stay in Teheran, dated the 21st of December 1820, he said:—“Both to satisfy [xxi]my own desire, and to prove my gratitude and love to my nation, I have set off, and must search for the origin of my nation according to the lights which I have kindled in Germany, avoiding neither dangers that may perhaps occur, nor the distance I may have to travel. Heaven has favoured my course, and if some great misfortune does not happen to me, I shall within a short time be able to prove that my conviction was founded upon no false basis.” During his stay in Calcutta, between his expeditions, he experienced “the bitterest moments of his life,” being conscious that up to that time he had fruitlessly looked for the origin of the Hungarians. It was that feeling, says Hunfalvy, which drove him forth upon the pilgrimage which proved fatal to him. “According to his conviction, the country inhabited by the Dsugur or Dzungar race, dwelling to the north-east of Lhassa, on the western frontier of China, was the goal which he had been seeking all his life, the region in which he might hope at length to discover the Asiatic descendants of the ancestors of his Hungarian forefathers.” The foundation of his hopes, as expressed a few days before his death to Dr. Campbell, was as follows:—“In the dialects of Europe, the Sclavonic, Celtic, Saxon, and German, I believe, the people who gave their name to the country now called Hungary were styled Hunger or Ungur, Oongar or Yoongar; and in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian works there are notices of a nation in Central Asia resembling in many respects the people who came from the East into Hungary. In these languages they are styled Oogur, Woogur, Voogur, or Yoogur, according to the pronunciation of the Persian letters; and from the same works it might be inferred, he said, that the country of the Yoogurs was situated as above noted.” His views, however, on this subject are not accepted by his countrymen. His opinion “was based upon a false foundation,” says Hunfalvy, and consequently his labours in that particular field have remained without result. But as a scholar in [xxii]general, as a specialist in everything which concerns Tibet, and as a single-minded, self-sacrificing student, he is held in high honour in his native land, as may be learnt from the oration which was delivered in his honour at Pest on the 8th of October 1843 by Baron Joseph Eötvos, who was at one time the Minister of Public Instruction for Hungary.
On this subject I have been favoured with a letter (in English) from the Hungarian linguist and explorer Professor Arminius Vámbéry. In it, after stating that scarcely anything is known in Hungary about the early years of Csoma Körösi, he proceeds to say:—“We only know that it was the study of Oriental languages in Germany which gave him the idea of the possibility of finding a people in Asia speaking our language, and closely connected with us. This, of course, was a mistake, for Hungarian, a mixed tongue consisting of an Ugrian and a Turko-Tatar dialect, has undergone two genetic periods—one in the ancient seat between the Urals and the Volga, and another after the settlement on Pannonia, where also large Slavonic elements inserted themselves. It was thus a sheer impossibility to discover in Asia a language similar to ours, although a considerable amount of affinity can be proved, partly in the Ugrian branch (the Ostyak and the Vogul), partly in the Eastern Turkish, unadulterated by Persian and Arab influence.
“This knowledge, however, is the result of recent investigations, and poor Körösi could have had hardly any notion of it. His unbounded love for science and for his nation drove him to the East without a penny in his pocket, and most curious is the account I heard from an old Hungarian, Count Teleky, regarding the outset of Körösi’s travels. The Count was standing before the gate of his house in a village in Transylvania, when he saw Körösi passing by, clad in a thin yellow nankin dress, with a stick in his hand and a small bundle.
“ ‘Where are you going, M. Körösi?’ asked the Count.
“ ‘I am going to Asia in search of our relatives,’ was the answer. [xxiii]
“And thus he really went … undergoing, as may easily be conceived, all the hardships and privations of a traveller destitute of means, living upon alms, and exposed, besides, to the bitter deception of not having found the looked-for relatives. And still he went on in his unflagging zeal, until, assisted by your noble countrymen, he was able to raise himself a memorial by his Tibetan studies.
“I suppose that, when dying in Ladak … he always had his eyes directed to the steppes north of Tibet, to the Tangus country, where, of course, he would have again been disillusioned.
“Körösi was therefore a victim to unripe philological speculation, like many other Hungarian scholars unknown to the world. But his name will be always a glory to our nation, and I am really glad to hear that [some one] … has devoted time to refresh the memory of that great man.—Yours very sincerely,
“A. Vámbéry.
“Budapest, February 20, 1882.”
About the time when Csoma Körösi was starting from Bucharest on his adventurous pilgrimage, another equally genuine and disinterested scholar, Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, was commencing his long residence in Nepal. Living continuously in that country for three-and-twenty years, and occupying from 1831 to 1843 the important post of British Resident at Kathmandu, he was able to succeed in making the immense collections of Buddhistic works which he afterwards, with a generosity as great as his industry, made gratuitously accessible to European scholars. “The real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrines of Buddha,” says Professor Max Müller (“Chips,” i. 190), “dates from the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal.” But there is no need to dwell here on the well-known fact that an immense amount of [xxiv]such Sanskrit literature was discovered by Mr. Hodgson in Nepal, and presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Société Asiatique of Paris. We have at present to deal only with the stores of information which he extracted from Tibet. Mr. Hodgson not only established the fact, Professor Max Müller goes on to say, “that some of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered had existed in the monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of our era,” but he also showed that “the whole of that collection had, five or six hundred years later, when Buddhism became definitely established in Tibet, been translated into the language of that country.” Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans, translated into their language from Sanskrit, Mr. Hodgson received a copy as a present from the Dalai Lama, and this he presented to the East India Company. As early as 1828 he printed in the “Asiatic Researches” (vol. xvi.) an article on Nepal and Tibet, in which he stated that “the body of Bhotiya [i.e., Tibetan] literature now is, and long has been, a mass of translations from Sanskrit; its language native; its letters (like its ideas) Indian.”21 To that statement he in 1837 appended this note: “It is needless now to say how fully these views have been confirmed by the researches of De Körös. It is but justice to myself to add that the real nature of the Kahgyur and Stangyur was expressly stated and proved by me to the secretary of the Asiatic Society some time before M. De Körös’s ample revelations were made. Complete copies of both collections have been presented by me to the Honourable East India Company, and others procured for the Asiatic Society, Calcutta: upon the latter M. De Körös worked.” It was a fortunate combination which brought the special knowledge and the patient industry of Csoma Körösi into contact with the immense mass of materials obtained by Mr. Hodgson from Tibet. [xxv]
Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans the following description is given by Professor Max Müller, who refers to Köppen’s “Religion des Buddha” as his authority:22—“It consists of two collections, commonly called the Kanjur and Tanjur. The proper spelling of their names is Bkah-hgyur, pronounced Kah-gyur,23 and Bstan-hgyur, pronounced Tan-gyur. The Kanjur consists, in its different editions, of 100, 102, or 108 volumes folio. It comprises 1083 distinct works. The Tanjur consists of 225 volumes folio, each weighing from four to five pounds in the edition of Peking. Editions of this colossal code were printed at Peking, Lhassa, and other places. The edition of the Kanjur published at Peking, by command of the Emperor Khian-Lung, sold for £600. A copy of the Kanjur was bartered for 7000 oxen by the Buriates, and the same tribe paid 1200 silver roubles for a complete copy of the Kanjur and Tanjur together. Such a jungle of religious literature—the most excellent hiding-place, we should think, for Lamas and Dalai-Lamas—was too much even for a man who could travel on foot from Hungary to Tibet. The Hungarian enthusiast, however, though he did not translate the whole, gave a most valuable analysis of this immense Bible in the seventeenth volume of the ‘Asiatic Researches,’ sufficient to establish the fact that the principal portion of it was a translation from the same Sanskrit originals which had been discovered in Nepal by Mr. Hodgson.”
The Sanskrit works which Mr. Hodgson so generously presented to the Asiatic Society of Paris were soon turned to good account. From them M. Eugène Burnouf drew the materials for his celebrated “Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien.” But of the Tibetan sacred writings, [xxvi]which were also rendered available to European students, no great use has ever been made except by two scholars. Csoma Körösi, as has been already stated, published an “Analysis of the Tibetan Work entitled the Kah-gyur,” and an “Abstract of the Contents of the Bstan-hgyur;” and M. P. E. Foucaux brought out at Paris in 1847 his “Rgya Tch’er Rol Pa, ou Développement des Jeux, contenant l’Histoire du Bouddha Çakya-Mouni, traduit sur la Version Tibétaine du Bhahhgyour, et Revu sur l’Original Sanskrit (Lalitavistâra).” M. Foucaux’s excellent work is too well known to require more than a passing notice here. But as Csoma Körösi’s Analyses are probably less familiar, it may be well to extract from them a short account of the different sections of the colossal Tibetan collection.
The first of its two parts, he remarks, is styled Ká-gyur, or vulgarly Kán-gyur,24 i.e., “Translation of Commandments,” being versions of Sanskrit writings imported into Tibet, and translated there between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, but mostly in the ninth. The copy on which he worked at Calcutta, consisting of 100 volumes, “appears to have been printed with the very wooden types that are mentioned as having been prepared in 1731.” This first part comprises seven divisions, which are in fact distinct works. These he names as follows:—
1. Dulvá (“Discipline,” Sanskrit Vinaya). This division occupies thirteen volumes, and deals with religious discipline and the education of persons who adopt the religious life. It is subdivided into seven parts as follows:—
- 1. “The Basis of Discipline or Education.” 4 vols.
- 2. “A Sútra on Emancipation.” 30 leaves.
- 3. “Explanation of Education.” 4 vols.
- 4. “A Sútra on Emancipation for the Priestesses or Nuns.” 36 leaves.
- 5. “Explanation of the Discipline or Education of the [xxvii]Priestesses or Nuns, in one volume with the preceding tract.”
- 6. “Miscellaneous Minutiæ concerning Religious Discipline.” 2 vols.
- 7. The chief text-book (or the last work of the Dulvá class) on education. 2 vols.
2. “Shés-rab-kyi-p’ha-rol-tu-p’hyin-pa (by contraction Shér-p’hyin, pronounced Sher-ch’hin), Sans. Prajná páramitá, Eng. ‘Transcendental wisdom.’ ” This division occupies twenty-one volumes, which all “treat of speculative or theoretical philosophy, i.e., they contain the psychological, logical, and metaphysical terminology of the Buddhists, without entering into the discussion of any particular subject.”
3. “Sangs-rgyas-p’hal-po-ch’hè, or by contraction P’hal-ch’hen, Sans. Buddhāvataṇsaka, … Association of Buddhas, or of those grown wise.” This division contains six volumes, the subject of the whole being “moral doctrine and metaphysics. There are descriptions of several Tathágatas or Buddhas, their provinces, their great qualifications, their former performances for promoting the welfare of all animal beings, their praises, and several legends. Enumeration of several Bodhisatwas, the several degrees of their perfections, their practices or manners of life, their wishes, prayers, and efforts for making happy all animal beings.”
4. “Dkon-mch’hog-brtségs-pa, or by contraction Dkon-brtségs (pronounced kon-tségs). In Sans. Ratna-kúṭa, the ‘Jewel-peak,’ or precious things heaped up, or enumeration of several qualities and perfections of Buddha and his instructions. The subject, as in the former division, still consists of morals and metaphysics, mixed with many legends and collections of the tenets of the Buddhistic doctrine.”
5. “Mdo-sdé (Sans. Sútránta), or simply Mdo (Sans. Sútra), signifying a treatise or aphorism on any subject. In a general sense, when the whole Káh-gyur is divided [xxviii]into two parts, Mdo and Rgyud, all the other divisions except the Rgyud are comprehended in the Mdo class. But in a particular sense there are some treatises which have been arranged or put under this title. They amount to about 270, and are contained in thirty volumes. The subject of the works contained in these thirty volumes is various.… The greatest part of them consist of the moral and metaphysical doctrine of the Buddhistic system, the legendary accounts of several individuals, with allusions to the sixty or sixty-four arts, to medicine, astronomy, and astrology. There are many stories to exemplify the consequences of actions in former transmigrations, descriptions of orthodox and heterodox theories, moral and civil laws, the six kinds of animal beings, the places of their habitations, and the causes of their being born there; cosmogony and cosmography according to the Buddhistic notions, the provinces of several Buddhas, exemplary conduct of life of any Bodhisatwa or saint, etc.” It is the second volume of this section which M. Foucaux has translated.
6. “Mya-n̄an-las-hdas-pa, or by contraction Myang-hdas (Sans. Nirváṇa), two vols. The title of these two volumes is in Sanskrit Mahá parinirváṇa sútra.… A sútra on the entire deliverance from pain. Subject, Shákya’s death under a pair of Sál trees near the city of Kusha or Kámarúpa, in Assam. Great lamentation of all sorts of animal beings on the approaching death of Shákya, their offerings or sacrifices presented to him, his lessons, especially with regard to the soul. His last moments, his funeral, how his relics were divided, and where deposited.”
7. “Rgyud-sdé, or simply Rgyud, Sans. Tantra, or the Tantra class, in twenty-two volumes. These volumes in general contain mystical theology. There are descriptions of several gods and goddesses, instructions for preparing the mandalas or circles for the reception of these divinities, offerings or sacrifices presented to them for obtaining their favour, prayers, hymns, charms, &c., &c., addressed [xxix]to them. There are also some works on astronomy, astrology, chronology, medicine, and natural philosophy.”
Of the second great division of the Tibetan sacred books Csoma Körösi gives only a brief abstract, “without mentioning the Sanscrit titles of the works” from which its contents have been translated. It will be sufficient to quote the opening lines of his article.
“The Bstan-Hgyur is a compilation in Tibetan of all sorts of literary works, written mostly by ancient Indian Pandits and some learned Tibetans, in the first centuries after the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, commencing with the seventh century of our era. The whole makes 225 volumes. It is divided into two classes, the Rgyud and Mdo (Tantra and Sútra classes in Sanscrit). The Rgyud, mostly on tantrika rituals and ceremonies, makes 87 volumes. The Mdo, on science and literature, occupies 136 volumes. One separate volume contains hymns or praises on several deities and saints, and one volume is the index for the whole.”25
In the year 1830, while Csoma Körösi was still pursuing his studies in the monasteries of Western Tibet, a Russian official, Baron Schilling de Canstadt, was beginning to look for Tibetan books in Eastern Siberia. His first visit, he says,26 to the monastery of Tchikoï, twelve leagues from Kiachta, the town in which he was stationed, made him aware that it possessed a copy of the Kah-gyur, as well as other sacred books, which were ranged on either side of [xxx]the altar, wrapped in red and yellow coverings. As the Russian ecclesiastical mission to Pekin was then on the point of starting from Kiachta, he offered to obtain by its means from China such books as the priests might require. They gladly accepted his offer, and made out lists of Tibetan books, which proved of great service to him, especially after they had been supplemented by the additions which were made by a Lama who visited him at Kiachta. He still further ingratiated himself with the priests by presenting them with a lo or tum-tum, which he procured from the nearest Chinese town, as well as by the respect he showed for their sacred books. For when he was allowed to handle a volume of their copy of the Kah-gyur, he took care to touch the margins only of the leaves, not the holy printed part.
It happened that the chief of a tribe of Tsongols possessed a copy of a part of the Kah-gyur, and this he gave to the appreciative stranger, who rose still higher in the opinion of the natives when they found that he had ordered a silken wrapper to be made for each of the volumes presented to him. He himself was delighted, he says, at becoming “the proprietor of the first Tibetan work of any length which had up to that time passed into the hands of a European.” After all this he was well received wherever he went. A prediction had been made a year before that a foreign convert to Buddhism, destined to spread that religion in the West, was about to visit Mongolia, and this prophecy was interpreted in his favour. The Buriat Lamas even looked upon him as “a Khoubil-ghan, an incarnation of an important personage in the Buddhist Pantheon.” After a time he organised a band of copyists, sometimes twenty in number, who lived in tents in his courtyard, and frequently consumed as much as a hundred pounds of beef in a day, besides much brick tea, a caldron being kept always on the boil for their use. At the end of a year he possessed a collection of [xxxi]Mongol and Tibetan books, containing two thousand works and separate treatises.
Happening to visit the temple of Subulin, he found that the Lamas were manufacturing an enormous prayer wheel. He offered to get the printing of the oft-repeated prayer done for them at St. Petersburg, whereby their machine would be rendered far more efficacious than if they trusted to native typography. They accepted his offer gladly, and to prove their gratitude, presented to him, in the name of the tribe, a complete copy of the Kah-gyur which they possessed, having obtained it from a Mongol Lama. Both parties to this transaction were equally pleased; for when the printed leaves came from St. Petersburg, it was found that each of them contained 2500 repetitions of the sacred formula, and the words were printed in red ink, which is 108 times more efficacious than black; and the paper itself was stamped with the same words instead of bearing the maker’s name. So the Buriates were charmed, and so was the European bibliophile, who had got possession of what he had scarcely hoped ever to obtain, a copy of the Kah-gyur in 101 volumes, printed in the monastery of Nartang in Western Tibet. This copy, after the death of Baron Schilling de Canstadt, was purchased from his heirs by the Emperor Nicholas, and presented to the Academy of Sciences.
M. Vasilief, the well-known author of the “History of Buddhism,” which has been translated from Russian into French and German, says27 that when he was at Pekin he made inquiries about the Kah-gyur and Tan-gyur, and he was shown the building in which they used to be printed. But no edition, he was told, had been brought out for some time. Some of the wood blocks were lost, others had suffered injury. However, a copy of each work was procured by the Chinese Government and presented to [xxxii]the Russian mission. These copies are now in St. Petersburg. The Mongol Buriates of Russia, M. Vasilief states, are even more devoted to their religion, and look to Lhassa more longingly than their kinsmen in Mongolia itself. They read their sacred books, or hear them read, in Tibetan, and are edified, even though they do not comprehend. Any one who wishes to command a reading of the Kah-gyur or Tan-gyur addresses himself to one of the monasteries which possess those works, pays a certain price, and provides tea for the Lamas. A reading of the Kah-gyur, it seems, used to come to about fifteen pounds at one of the monasteries, exclusive of tea. At a given signal all the Lamas flock together, and take their places according to seniority. Before each are placed a number of leaves of the work, and off they set, all reading at once, so that the entire performance occupies only a few hours, after which each reader receives his share of the offering made by the orderer of the function.
Of the Russian scholars who availed themselves of the presence of the two editions of the Kah-gyur at St. Petersburg, the most enthusiastic and industrious was the late Professor Anton von Schiefner. From the Dulvā, the first of the seven divisions of that work, he translated into German the legends and tales, an English version of which is contained in the present volume. His German versions all appeared in the “Mélanges Asiatiques tirés du Bulletin de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg” (tom. vi.–viii.), with the exceptions of Nos. 2 and 5, which were published in the “Mémoires” of that Society (series vii., tom. xix., No. 6). Professor Schiefner, if he had lived another year, would have doubtless supplied a number of additional notes, and would have written an Introduction to the work. His lamented death on November 16, 1880, has deprived the present volume of what would probably have been one of its most interesting parts. It was at Professor Schiefner’s express wish that the present translation was undertaken. It [xxxiii]must be a subject of universal regret that he did not live to witness its appearance in print. The following tribute to his merits as a scholar was contributed, soon after his death, by Professor Albrecht Weber to “Trübner’s Record.”
“Professor F. Anton von Schiefner was a distinguished scholar of most various attainments. His specialty, however, was Tibetan, and more particularly the investigation of Buddhist legends of Indian and Occidental origin, a collection of which in English will soon be published by Messrs. Trübner & Co. He had, moreover, devoted himself with rare perseverance and disinterestedness to the utilisation and publication of the labours of two scholars whose own restless activity would, without him, have been almost entirely lost to the scientific world—namely, those of the Finnic linguist, Alexander Castrèn, and of the Caucasian linguist, Baron von Uslar. One might—sit venia verbo—almost say that both men had found in Schiefner their Homer. He edited the labours of Castrèn almost wholly from the posthumous papers of that brave and modest man, who, from 1838 to 1849, explored, under the greatest privations, the inhospitable regions of Norway, Lapland, and Siberia, where the tribes of the Finnic race are seated. Castrèn’s Reiseerinnerungen and Reiseberichte, edited by Schiefner, present a vivid picture of the hardships Castrèn had to go through, and which finally caused his premature death, in 1852, at the age of thirty-nine. We have lying before us the twelve volumes of his Samoyedan and Tungusian Grammars and Vocabularies, as well as those of the languages of the Buryats, Koibals, Karagasses, Ostyaks, &c.; his ethnological lectures on the Altaic races, and those on Finnic mythology—all worked out by Schiefner’s deft hand, and edited by him from 1835 to 1861. In connection therewith Schiefner also made a German translation of the Finnic national epos Kalevala, and also one of the Hero-Sagas of the Minussin Tatars. Schiefner was more advantageously situated in [xxxiv]working up the collections of the estimable Caucasian linguist, Major-General von Uslar (1816 to 1873), written in the Russian language, with whom, until the General’s death, he was always able to confer directly. While Schiefner’s own and entirely independent work on the Thush language (1856), by the accuracy with which a hitherto quite uncultivated and altogether strange department was opened to linguistic investigation, had obtained for the author general appreciation, the united efforts of both scholars have furnished surprising results as regards these highly peculiar languages of the Caucasian mountaineers—the Avares, Abchases, Tchetchenzes, Kasikumüks, Kurines—which by their extraordinary sounds, as well as by their most singular grammatical structure, produce so very strange an impression. The personal intercourse with soldiers of Caucasian origin, garrisoned at St. Petersburg, was herein of high importance to Schiefner. His amiable and open manner in personal intercourse, characteristic of the whole man, bore him excellent fruit in this case. Science, and especially the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, has by Schiefner’s death sustained a heavy, indeed a quite irreparable, loss.”28
The edition of the Kah-gyur on which Professor Schiefner worked appears (says M. Vasilief, the author of the “History of Buddhism”) to have been that in 108 volumes, printed at Pekin during the eighteenth century, and presented to the Asiatic Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences by the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had received it, about the year 1850, from the Russian Mission in China. [xxxv]
The notes to the present volume signed S. are by Professor Schiefner. A few others have been added, consisting for the most part of extracts from Professor Monier Williams’s Sanskrit Dictionary. The forms of Indian names adopted by Professor Schiefner have been retained in the English translation, with certain modifications—y being substituted for j, for instance, ch for tsh, and j for dsh. It ought to be stated that Professor Schiefner made several important corrections on the sheets which he prepared for the use of his English translator, and therefore the English version will sometimes be found to differ materially from the German text.29 [xxxvi]
To European folk-tales the longer legends of the Kahgyur bear but little resemblance, though many of the fables about animals, and other short stories towards the end of the present volume, have their counterparts in the West. Here and there, however, even in the long narratives of the legendary class, certain features may be recognised as being common to both Europe and Asia. The moral of King Māndhātar’s story (No. 1), for instance, seems to be identical, different as is its machinery, with that of a story which is current in many Western lands. That monarch, after conquering the whole earth, ascends into the heavenly home of the thirty-three gods, and is allowed to share the throne of their chief, Śakra or Indra. But at last he wishes for too much. “He came to the conclusion that he must expel the king of the gods, Śakra, from his throne, and take into his own hands the government of both gods and men.” As soon as he had conceived this idea, “the great King Māndhātar came to the end of his good fortune,” and soon afterwards he died. The most familiar form of the European story, which inculcates a similar moral teaching, is the German tale of “The Fisherman and his Wife” (the 19th of Grimm’s Collection). In it, a grateful fish for a long time accedes to every desire expressed by the fisherman. He and his wife become first rich, then noble, and eventually royal. But the fisherman’s wife is not satisfied with being a queen. She wishes to be the Pope, and the fish fulfils her desire. Even then she is discontented, and at last she demands to be made God. When the fish is told this [xxxvii]by her husband, it replies, “Go back, and you will find her in her hovel.” The fisherman’s good fortune has come to an end. He and his wife are poor folks once more. In a Hesse variant the husband’s final wish is, “Let me be God, and my wife the Mother of God.”30
A curious parallel to one of the incidents in King Māndhātar’s story is afforded by a Polynesian myth. On the crown of King Utposhadha’s head, according to the Tibetan tale, “there grew a very soft tumour, somewhat resembling a cushion of cotton or wool, without doing him any harm. When it had become quite ripe and had broken, there came forth from it a boy, shapely and handsome.” Mr. Gill tells us in his interesting “Myths and Songs from the South Pacific” (p. 10), that Tangaroa and Rongo were the children of Vātea, the father of gods and men, and his wife Papa. “Tangaroa should have been born first, but gave precedence to his brother Rongo. A few days after the birth of Rongo, his mother Papa suffered from a very large boil on her arm. She resolved to get rid of it by pressing it. The core accordingly flew out; it was Tangaroa! Another account, equally veracious, says that Tangaroa came right up through Papa’s head. The precise spot is indicated by ‘the crown’ with which all their descendants have since been born.” Professor Schiefner mentions that a suggestion has been made to the effect that “the name of Utposhadha may be a transformation of the Greek Hephæstus, though the part which the latter plays in the Greek myth at the birth of Athene is of a different nature.” But this seems to be going unnecessarily far.
The story of Kuśa, No. 2, may be linked with the numerous European variants of the tale which we know so well under the title of “Beauty and the Beast.” The principal feature of that tale is the union of a beautiful maiden with a monster of some kind, whose monstrosity is eventually [xxxviii]cured by her love and devotion. The Beast with whom the Beauty is linked is generally a supernatural monster, and possesses the power of at times divesting itself of its monstrous or bestial envelope or husk, and appearing in its real form as a fairy prince or other brilliant being. It is, as a general rule, only at night in the dark that this transformation takes place. In some cases, as in the Cupid and Psyche story, the wife is forbidden to look upon her husband. He visits her only in utter darkness. But in many versions of the story she is allowed to see her pseudo-monster in all his brilliant beauty. He is often a deity, whom some superior divinity has degraded from the sky and compelled to live upon earth under a monstrous shape. One day the wife lays her hands on her husband’s monstrous envelope or husk and destroys it. The spell being thus broken, the husband either flies away to heaven or remains living on earth in uninterrupted beauty.
In some of the European variants, the original idea having apparently been forgotten, the transformation appears not only grotesque but unreasonable. Thus in a Wallachian tale (Schott, No. 23), a princess is married to “a pumpkin,” or at least to a youth who is a pumpkin by day. Wishing to improve her husband, she one day puts him in the oven and bakes him, whereupon he disappears for ever. In a German story (Grimm, No. 127), a princess who has lost her way in a wood is induced to marry an iron stove. But the disfiguring “husk” is in most cases the hide or skin of some inferior animal, an ass, a monkey, a frog, or the like, or else the outside of a hideous man. Sometimes it is a brilliant female being who is after this fashion “translated.” Thus an Indian story31 tells of a prince who was obliged to take a monkey as his wife. But when she liked she could slip out of her monkey skin and appear as a beautiful woman arrayed in the most magnificent apparel. She adjured her husband to take [xxxix]great care of her “husk” during her absence from it. But one day he burnt it, hoping to force her to be always beautiful. She shrieked “I burn!” and disappeared. In a Russian variant of the same story a prince is compelled to marry a frog, which is “held in a bowl” while the marriage service is being performed. But when it so pleases her, his frog-wife “flings off her skin and becomes a fair maiden.” One day he burns her “husk,” and she disappears. In the Tibetan story of Kuśa, the “Beast” is merely an ugly man disfigured by “the eighteen signs of uncomeliness.”32 On that account it was decided that “he must never be allowed to approach his wife by daylight.” But she caught sight of him one day, and her suspicions were aroused. So she hid away a lighted lamp in her room, uncovered it suddenly when her husband was with her, shrieked out that he was a demon, and fled away. After a time, however, won by his military reputation, she said to herself, “As this youth Kuśa is excellently endowed with boldness and courage, why should I dislike him?” And straightway “she took a liking for him,” just as the Beauty of the fairy-tale did for the Beast. It may be worth noticing that the conch-shell which Kuśa sounds with such force that the ears of his enemies are shattered, and they are either killed or put to flight, finds a Russian parallel in the whistle employed by the brigand Solovei, or Nightingale, whom Ilya of Murom overcomes. In the builmas, or Russian metrical romances, he often figures; and when he sounds his whistle his enemies fall to the ground, nearly or quite dead.
No. 3, which chronicles some of the wise judgments of King Ādarśamukha, comprises two different stories—the first narrating the ingenuity with which the king satisfied the demands of a number of complainants without injuring the man who had involuntarily given rise to their complaints; [xl]the second describing a journey made by a traveller who was commissioned by various persons, animals, or other objects, passed by him on his way, to ask certain questions on his arrival at his destination. The latter story is one which is familiar to Eastern Europe. In one of its Russian variants a peasant hospitably receives an old beggar, who adopts him as his brother, and invites him to pay him a visit. On his way to the beggar’s home, he is appealed to by children, who say, “Christ’s brother, ask Christ whether we must suffer here long.” Later on, girls engaged in ladling water from one well into another beg him to ask the same question on their account. When he arrives at his journey’s end he becomes aware that his beggar friend is Christ himself; and he is informed that the children he had passed on the way had been cursed by their mothers while still unborn, and so were unable to enter Paradise; and the girls had, while they were alive, adulterated the milk they sold with water, and were therefore condemned to an eternal punishment resembling that of the Danaides (Afanasief, “Legendui,” No. 8). The judgments attributed in the Tibetan tale to King Ādarśamukha, and in another Tibetan work, the “Dsanglun” (as Professor Schiefner has remarked) to King Mdges-pa, form the subject of a story well known in Russia under the title of “Shemyakin Sud,” or “Shemyaka’s Judgment.” It exists there as a folk-tale, but it belongs to what may be called the chap-book literature of the country, and it is derived from literary sources. A variant given by Afanasief (“Skazki,” v., No. 19) closely resembles part of the Tibetan tale. A poor man borrowed from his rich brother a pair of oxen, with which he ploughed his plot of ground. Coming away from the field he met an old man, who asked to whom the oxen belonged. “To my brother,” was the reply. “Your brother is rich and stingy,” said the old man; “choose which you will, either his son shall die or his oxen.” The poor man thought and thought. He was sorry both for the oxen and for his brother’s son. [xli]At last he said, “Better let the oxen die.” “Be it as you wish,” said the old man. When the poor man reached his home the oxen suddenly fell down dead. The rich brother accused him of having worked them to death, and carried him off to the king. On his way to the king’s court the poor man, according to the chap-book version (“Skazki,” viii. p. 325), accidentally sat down upon a baby and killed it, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but only succeeded in crushing an old man whose son was taking him into the river for a bath. He had also had the misfortune to pull off a horse’s tail without meaning it. When summoned into court for all these involuntary offences, he took a stone in his pocket tied up in a handkerchief, and stealthily produced it when he was had up before the judge, saying to himself, “If the judge goes against me I will kill him with this.” The judge fancied that the stone was a bribe of a hundred roubles which the defendant wished to offer him; so he gave judgment in his favour in each case. The poor man was to keep his brother’s horse until its tail grew again, and to marry the woman whose child he had crushed, and to stand under the bridge from which he had jumped and allow the son of the man he had killed to jump off the bridge on to him. The owner of the horse, the husband of the woman, and the son of the crushed man were all glad to buy off the culprit whom they had brought up for judgment. The satirical turn of the story and the allusion to bribe-taking are characteristic features of the Russian variants of this well-known Eastern tale. The Russian story takes its title from the notorious injustice and oppression of Prince Demetrius Shemyaka, who blinded his cousin, Vasily II., Grand Prince of Moscow, and for a time usurped his throne. To this day an unjust legal decision is known as a Shemyaka judgment. But in the Eastern versions of the story, which are numerous, there is no mention of injustice; stupidity, however, is sometimes attributed by them to the judge. Thus in the [xlii]Kathá Sarit Ságara33 the story of Devabhúti tells how the excellent wife of the learned Brahman of that name “went into the kitchen garden to get vegetables, and saw a donkey belonging to a washerman eating them. So she took up a stick and ran after the donkey, and the animal fell into a pit as it was trying to escape and broke its hoof. When its master heard of that, he came in a passion and beat with a stick and kicked the Brahman woman. Accordingly she, being pregnant, had a miscarriage, but the washerman returned home with his donkey. Then her husband, hearing of it, came home after bathing, and, after seeing his wife, went in his distress and complained to the chief magistrate of the town. The foolish man immediately had the washerman, whose name was Balásura, brought before him, and, after hearing the pleadings of both parties, delivered this judgment: ‘Since the donkey’s hoof is broken, let the Bráhman carry the donkey’s load for the washerman until the donkey is again fit for work, and let the washerman make the Bráhman’s wife pregnant again, since he made her miscarry. Let this be the punishment of the two parties respectively.’ When the Bráhman heard this, he and his wife in their despair took poison and died. And when the king heard of it, he put to death that inconsiderate judge.”
As they deal with the subject of wise judgment, the seventh and eighth stories may be spoken of next. One of them describes the cleverness of a girl, the other that of a lad. Each of them is very popular in the East, and both of them find more or less complete counterparts in the West. There is a well-known group of folk-tales familiar to most European and Asiatic lands, the theme of which is the sharpness of a woman’s wits. Just as there thrive among the common people of all countries many jeers and flouts against women, such as the proverbs [xliii]“A woman’s hair is long, but her mind is short,” and “A woman is worse than a dog, for it does not bark at its master,” or stories illustrative of a wife’s obstinacy, folly, or perfidy, so there flourish by their side numerous popular arguments in favour of women, generally conveyed in the form of stories. In the Perso-Turkish story-book of “The Forty Viziers,” a tale accusing women frequently alternates with one told in their defence. The framework of the collection is as follows:—A wicked queen calumniates her stepson as Phædra calumniated Hippolytus. His father sentences him to death. But the forty ministers intercede for him, each of them daily telling a tale of which the aim generally is to show how little reliance can be placed on a woman. Each night the queen tells a story which is usually of quite the opposite tendency, pointing out that men are miserable creatures, and that they are morally inferior to women. At the end of the forty days and nights, the prince is allowed to speak in his own defence (having been during that period prohibited by the astrologers from opening his lips), and all goes well. Among encomiums upon women, the story of Viśākhā (forming No. 7 of the present collection and a part of No. 8) is entitled to rank high. Her discretion, intelligence, and thoughtfulness for others, entitle her to an honourable place among the heroines of popular fiction. One of her decisions of a knotty legal point is specially interesting, as it belongs to the cycle of which Solomon’s judgments in the case of the two disputing mothers is the best known example. The actual mother and the adopted mother of a boy dispute as to which is really his mother. The point is legally important, for with the possession of the boy goes that of his deceased father’s homestead. The case is referred to the king, whose ministers investigate it, but in vain. At length Viśākhā is consulted. She replies, “What need is there of investigation? Speak to the two women thus: ‘As we do not know to which of you two the boy belongs, let who is the strongest take the [xliv]boy.’ When each of them has laid hold of one of the boy’s hands and he begins to cry out on account of the pain, the real mother will let go, being full of compassion for him, and knowing that if her child remains alive she will be able to see it again. But the other, who has no compassion for him, will not let go.”34 Professor Schiefner has called attention in a note to the article in “Ausland” by the late Professor Benfey on the somewhat similar tale of “Die Kluge Dirne,” and to the variant of the Viśākhā story given in Mr. Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism.” There is a well-known folk-tale about a woman’s intelligence, of which the Russian variant may be cited here. It is the 6th of Khudyakoff’s collection of “Great Russian Popular Tales” (Moscow, 1860). A peasant girl was so intelligent that she solved all the problems proposed to her by a certain judge. Charmed by her cleverness, he married her. But he stipulated that if she ever found fault with any of his legal decisions she was to be divorced, and was bound to return at once to her father’s cottage. Only she was to be allowed to take away with her whatever thing she liked best in her husband’s house. All went well for some time with the judge and his clever wife. At length she heard him deliver a preposterous judgment in court, and she could not help protesting against it. Accordingly she was ordered to return to her father’s hut. She obeyed, but she took with her the judge, to whom she had administered so much liquor before leaving, that she was able to drive him in a cart tranquilly sleeping. When he awoke, and found himself in his father-in-law’s cottage, he naturally asked how he got there. “I brought you away with me,” replied the divorced wife. “You know I was entitled to take away whatever I liked best in your house, and I chose you.”35 There is a very interesting story of the same kind in [xlv]Radloff’s great collection of songs and tales from Central Asia (“Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Sud-Sibiriens,” vol. iii. pp. 347–354). There was once a choleric khan who understood the language of birds. He ordered his vizier one day to find out what two geese had said to each other as they flew past, threatening to put him to death if he failed to do so. The vizier applied for help to the khan’s wise daughter, who gave him the information he required. He promised not to mention his informant, but he broke his promise. The khan was so angry with his daughter, when he found out that it was she who had told the vizier what the geese had said, that he gave her in marriage to the most miserable specimen of humanity he could find. She proved an excellent wife to her unsightly and poverty-stricken husband, and he and she prospered in consequence.36
The story of the cleverness of Mahaushadha (No. 8) forms the counterpart of that of Viśākhā, who herself plays a part in the tale, which is told at somewhat tedious length. Some of its incidents will be familiar to readers of Western folk-tales. Professor Schiefner has called attention (in a footnote to page 129) to several variants of the story of the mystic fowl—sometimes a cock, sometimes a hen or goose, a layer of golden eggs—the eater of which is destined to become a king. It forms the opening of the German story of “The Two Brothers” (Grimm, No. 60, vol. iii. pp. 102–107); but in it the peculiarity of the bird is stated to be that the eating of its heart and liver enables the eater to become rich. Three Russian variants of the story are given by Afanasief in his collection of “Russian Popular Tales” (v., No. 53, viii., No. 26, and pp. 464–7). In all of them the eater of the bird or a part of it becomes a king. Many mythologists37 recognise [xlvi]in the golden egg the Sun, which may be looked upon as a gleaming egg laid every morning by the brooding Night. But the king-making power attributed to the bird’s eaten flesh remains a mystery. In the story of Mahaushadha, the boy Bahvannapāna, who has eaten the head of the mystic cock, is elected king by the ministers at a certain court on account of his good looks. Having gone forth in search of some successor to their deceased monarch, they find him sleeping under a tree, “the shadow of which never moved from his body,” and they exclaim, “As he is extremely handsome, and is well provided with signs, we will invest him with the sovereignty.” In the East-European variants the fortunate youth is frequently chosen as king because his taper, when he takes one to church, kindles of its own accord. One of the tasks which Mahaushadha is called upon to execute by way of proving his cleverness is “to supply some rice which had not been crushed with a pestle, and yet was not uncrushed, and which had been cooked neither in the house nor out of the house, neither with fire nor yet without fire,” and to send it “neither along the road nor yet away from the road, without its being shone upon by the daylight, but yet not in the shade,” by a messenger who should be “not riding, but also not on foot” (page 139). Similar tests frequently appear in European folk-tales. Thus, in one of the Lithuanian Tales (Schleicher, No. 1), a gentleman promises to marry a village maiden if she can fulfil certain conditions, saying, “If you come to me neither clothed nor bare, not riding nor driving nor walking, not along the road, nor beside the road, nor on the footpath, in summer and likewise in winter, then will I marry you.” The abduction of the mule which was watched by five men (page 142), one of whom sat on its back while the others held its four legs, is evidently a reminiscence of an ingenious theft commemorated in many such stories as “The Master Thief” (Grimm, No. 192). But Mahaushadha’s contrivances for making the dog talk and for keeping [xlvii]the sheep thin (page 175) are novel. The latter, as a plan of working on the body through the eye, may be compared with Jacob’s use of the rods which he placed “in the watering-troughs when the flocks came to drink” (Genesis xxx. 38).
The “Clever Thief” (No. 4) is one of the numerous variants of the well-known story which we generally associate with the treasure of Rhampsinitos.38 As Professor Schiefner has pointed out some of its Western parallels (pp. 37 and 43), it is not necessary to do more here than to add a few references to those which he has given. Professor Schiefner has himself written on the subject.39 The most recent commentator is Professor G. Maspero, who has devoted to it four pages of the Introduction to his collection of ancient Egyptian tales.40 The name of Rhampsinitos, he says, is a Greek form of the Egyptian name Ram-sis-si-nit, or Ramses the son of Nit. Two objections, he remarks, have been made to the supposition that the story is of Egyptian origin. One is the nature of the masonry employed by the builders of the treasury, which has been stated not to be in keeping with Egyptian architectural practice. The other is the shaving of the beards of the drunken soldiers who had been set to watch the corpse of the clever thief’s comrade. This has been said to be an incident evidently not of Egyptian origin, seeing that in Egypt only barbarians wore beards. But Professor Maspero impugns both objections. He shows that some Egyptian temples did actually possess hiding-places resembling that described in the story; and as regards the shaving, he points out that in the first place Egyptians could wear beards, and did wear them when they felt inclined, and that in the second [xlviii]place the soldiers who guarded the corpse would belong “to a tribe of Lybian origin of the name of Matiou,” and therefore be fully entitled, in their capacity of foreigners, to wear their beards. A modern Greek variant of the story has been lately discovered in Cyprus,41 and Mr. Tawney has recently translated an Indian variant,42 which offers a striking resemblance to the Gaelic tale of “The Shifty Lad.”43 The Tibetan tale, however, is more nearly akin to the Egyptian form of the story than to that which it takes in this Indian variant.
The story of Prince Sudhana (No. 5) has several points in common with Western folk-tales. One of these is the capture by the hunter Phalaka of the celestial maiden, the Kinnarī Manoharā, who becomes Sudhana’s bride. This is effected by means of a “fast-binding chain” which the hunter throws around her when she is bathing in a lake. Her companions fly away heavenward, leaving her a captive on earth. This incident will at once remind the reader of the captures of “swan-maidens” and other supernatural nymphs, which so frequently occur in popular romance. It is usually the swan’s feather-dress or bird-husk on which the liberty of the captured maiden depends. While she is deprived of it she must live on earth as a mortal’s wife. But if she can recover it, she becomes a bird once more, and soars heavenward. Manoharā is captured by means of a magic chain. But her power of flying through the air depends upon her possession of a jewel. So long as she is without that, she remains a slave; when she recovers it, she becomes free and flies aloft.44 Sudhana’s visit to the palace of his supernatural wife’s [xlix]father, and the task which is set him of recognising her amid her ladies, bear a strong resemblance to the adventures which befall the heroes of many tales current in Europe. A mortal youth often obtains, and then for a time loses, a supernatural wife, generally represented as the daughter of a malignant demon. He makes his way, like Sudhana, to the demon’s abode. There tasks are set him, which he accomplishes by means of his wife’s help. One of these is that he shall recognise her when surrounded by her numerous sisters, each of whom is exactly like her in appearance and dress. He calls upon her to step forth from among them; she does so, and the recognition takes place.
As a specimen of an European variant of the tale may be taken the Russian story of “The Water-King” (“Russian Folk-Tales,” No. 19). In it a prince steals the dress of one of the water-king’s twelve daughters while they are bathing. Her sisters become spoonbills and fly away, but she remains in his power till he restores her dress. Then she also flies away in spoonbill form. When he arrives after a time at her father’s palace, she aids him to accomplish the tasks which are set him. At last the water-king says, “Choose yourself a bride from among my twelve daughters. They are all exactly alike in face, in hair, and in dress. If you can pick out the same one three times running, she shall be your wife; if you fail to do so, I shall have you put to death.” The maiden whose dress he had stolen and restored enables him to succeed in this task also. The recognition of Sudhana by his wife, brought about by means of a ring, is an incident of which frequent use is made in folk-tales. When a demon’s daughter, or a princess who has been enslaved by a demon, has enabled a hero to escape along with her from that demon’s power, she often warns him that he will forget her if he, on his return home, kisses his mother (as in “Two Kings’ Children,” Grimm, No. 113), or does something else which he has been forbidden to do. He [l]always neglects the warning and forgets his wife. But eventually she manages to remind him of her existence, usually by means of a ring. In the similar story of “The Mastermaid” (“Tales from the Norse,” No. 11), the recognition is due to a golden apple and two golden fowls which the hero and heroine had carried off from a giant’s palace. In “The Battle of the Birds” (Campbell’s “West Highland Tales,” No. 2), the prince forgets the giant’s daughter after being kissed by “an old greyhound,” but remembers her when he hears a conversation between a golden pigeon and a silver pigeon which spring out of a glass offered to his forgotten love. Similar parallels to this story will be found in most of the large collections of European folk-tales.
A curious feature in the story is the ablution to which Manoharā is subjected after her stay among mortals (p. 71), in order that “the smell of humanity” may be “washed off her.” In a similar story in the “Kathā Sarit Sāgara,”45 a hero who has been deserted by his celestial spouse, Bhadrā, wanders long in search of her. At length he reaches a mountain lake to which come “to draw water many beautiful women with golden pitchers in their hands.” He asks them why they are drawing water, and they reply, “A Vidyádharí of the name of Bhadrá is dwelling on this mountain; this water is for her to bathe in.” Whereupon he slips into one of the pitchers the jewelled ring which his wife had given him. And so it comes to pass that when “the water of ablution” is poured over her, the ring falls into her lap. She recognises it, and all goes well.
The long history of “Prince Jīvaka, the King of Physicians” (No. 6), has little in common with Western folk-lore. The cures he performs, by either opening the skull and removing from the brain headache-producing centipedes, or else eliminating such similar intruders by a less heroic operation, may, however, be likened to somewhat similar [li]kinds of surgical treatment mentioned in European folk-tales. Thus in a modern Greek story46 a girl is relieved from the presence of a number of snakes which had taken up their abode within her by being suspended from a branch of a tree above a caldron of boiling milk, the vapour arising from which induced the reptiles to come forth. There is an English story also of a country clergy-man who could obtain no rest from headaches, till at last he induced the village blacksmith to hit him on the head with his largest hammer. The ecclesiastic’s skull cracked beneath the blow, and out came sufficient swarms of earwigs to account for his complaint. But this story requires verification. The cure effected at p. 103, to which no parallel is found in the variant of the legend in Mr. Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” though the skull-opening incident occurs in it (p. 242), resembles that brought about by Kīrtisenā in the case of King Vasudatta’s headache in the Kathā Sarit Sāgara.47 She learnt how to treat the malady from a Rākshasī, who gave the following instructions as to how the king might be cured, unaware that a human being was listening:—“First his head must be anointed by rubbing warm butter on it, and then it must be placed for a long time in the heat of the sun, intensified by noonday. And a hollow cane-tube must be inserted into the aperture of his ear, which must communicate with a hole in a plate, and this plate must be placed above a pitcher of cool water. Accordingly the centipedes will be annoyed by heat and perspiration, and will come out of his head, and will enter that cane-tube from the aperture of the ear, and, desiring coolness, will fall into the pitcher.” Kīrtisenā carried out these instructions, and the result was that she “extracted from the head of that king, through the aperture of the ear, one hundred and fifty centipedes.”
The lovely maiden Āmrapālī, the Dryad-like nymph [lii]who emerges (p. 85) from the kadalī tree in the āmra grove, closely resembles the tree-maidens who figure in some European popular tales. In the 21st of Hahn’s “Griechische Märchen,” the stem of a laurel opens and forth comes “a wondrously fair maiden.” In the sixth story of Basile’s “Pentamerone,” a fairy comes forth in the same way from a date spray, and in the second from a bilberry twig. The homes of the nymphs of this class are as often flowers as trees. In a Russian story (Afanasief, vi., No. 66), the heroine is transformed after death into a wondrous blossom. At midnight “the blossom begins to tremble, then it falls from its stem to the ground, and turns into a lovely maiden.” In the same way the heroine of the German story of “The Pink” (Grimm, No. 76) becomes a flower at her lover’s wish; and many other similar instances might be quoted. All such ideas as these appear to have been originally connected with the tree-worship which formed so important a part of the religion of our remote ancestors, and on which so excellent a work was written a few years ago by the late Wilhelm Mannhardt.48
Of special interest, as dealing with this kind of worship, is the opening of the Buddhistic legend of Mahākāśyapa and Bhadrā (No. 9). Tree-worship existed long before Buddhism was heard of, and it has succeeded in maintaining its existence in many lands up to the present day. There is no lack of stories relating to it; but it is not often that we obtain so clear an insight into the ideas of tree-worshippers, or are favoured with so detailed an account of the rites which they were wont to celebrate, as are afforded by the description of the childless Brahman’s appeal to the Nyagrodha tree (p. 187). It serves to illustrate the confusion existing in the minds of tree-worshippers between the material tree and its spiritual tenant. The Brahman Nyagrodha, the tree’s namesake, first caused the ground in its neighbourhood to be “sprinkled, cleansed, [liii]and adorned.” Then he set up flags and banners, and provided a profusion of perfumes, flowers, and incense. Finally, “he prayed to the tree-haunting deity,” promising to pay that divine being due honour if a son should be born to him, but threatening, in case he should remain childless, to cut down the tree and split it into chips, destined to be consumed with fire. In another passage of the Kah-gyur (vol. vi., p. 280) Professor Schiefner remarks in a note appended to this passage, “Bhagavant gives directions that, in case it is absolutely necessary to fell a tree, the work-masters of the Bhikshus shall draw a circle around it seven or eight days before felling it, offer up perfumes, flowers, and oblations, recite tantras and utter spells, proclaim abhorrence of the path of the ten vices, and moreover say, ‘Let the deity who inhabits this tree find another dwelling. With this tree shall a religious or ecclesiastical work be accomplished.’ Seven or eight days after this the tree may be felled. But if any change be perceptible, it must not be felled. If none is perceptible, then it may be cut down.”
One of the stories of the “Panchatantra” (the 8th of Book 5) may be compared with the opening of No. 9, so far as tree-worship is concerned, and with the already quoted (in illustration of No. 1) German story about a wife’s unreasonable wishes. A weaver, who wanted timber for a new loom, was about to fell a tree, when the spirit which resided in it protested against the operation, and promised, if the tree was spared, to fulfil any wish the weaver might express. The weaver assented, but before specifying his wish he went home and consulted his wife. She recommended him to ask for an additional pair of hands and another head, for by their means he would be able to keep two looms going instead of one. The weaver took his wife’s advice, and requested the tree-spirit to render him two-headed and four-armed. “No sooner said than done. In an instant he became equipped with a couple of heads and four arms, and returned home highly delighted with [liv]his new acquisitions. No sooner, however, did the villagers see him, than, greatly alarmed, they exclaimed ‘a goblin! a goblin!’ and between striking him with sticks and pelting him with stones speedily put an end to his existence.”49
The greater part of No. 9, the account of the ascetic life led by Bhadrā and her husband, belongs to a different world from that of folk-lore, but in the “Acta Sanctorum,” and in some popular legends derived from that source, parallels may be found equally conducive to edification.
In No. 10, also, we are taken away from the region of folk-tales, but this time into that of such literary fictions as form a part of the “Thousand and One Nights.” It, also, is not of a very edifying nature; but it is valuable as showing what utter nonsense many of the corrupted Buddhistic legends contain, and illustrating the custom prevalent among literary Buddhists (one in which they were perhaps surpassed by the Christian compilers of such works as the “Gesta Romanorum”) of appending an unexceptionable moral to a tale of an unsavoury nature. The rapidity with which the narrator, at the close of the story of Utpalavarṇā, passes from the record of her dissoluteness to the account of her conversion is somewhat startling. The same remark applies also to the close of the history of Kṛiśā Gautamī (No. 11). That narrative is as little edifying, for the most part, as the legend which precedes it. One of the tricks resorted to in it, the lengthening at will, by means of some magical substance, of the nose of an obnoxious individual, frequently figures in popular tales. In one of the stories from Central Asia (Jülg, “Mongolische Märchen,” No. 14), the fairies elongate an intruder’s nose to such an extent that they are able to tie seven knots in it. But they perform that operation by sheer force. In European folk-tales the abnormal growth of the nose, or the sudden appearance of horns or the like, is generally caused by the magical properties of some fruit or other apparently harmless substance [lv](Grimm, No. 122, iii., 204, Hahn, No. 44). In the present case, the means employed for the lengthening of the nose is a piece of wood, and a piece of another kind of wood reverses the operation. In the folk-tales the magical substance which produces the wished-for result is generally discovered by accident. In the Tibetan legend its discovery is due to its employer’s observation of a raven, which lengthened its beak by rubbing it on a piece of wood when it wanted to get at a corpse otherwise out of its reach, and afterwards reduced it to its normal proportions when it had finished its meal. The magic lute which plays so important a part in the story of Suśroṇī (No. 12) is of course closely related to all the musical instruments of magic power which both literature and folk-lore have rendered familiar, from the harp or lyre of Orpheus or Amphion to the pipe of the Piper of Hameln, the dance-inspiring fiddle of the German tales of “Roland” and “The Jew in Thorns” (Grimm, Nos. 56 and 110), the magic flute which an angel gives to the strong fool of the modern Greek story of Bakala (Hahn, No. 34), and a number of similar instruments capable of making trees and rocks reel and men and women wildly skip. In these dance-compelling instruments many mythologists recognise symbols of the wind.50 One of the most interesting of the European folk-tales in which such instruments occur is the Esthonian story of “Pikne’s Bagpipes,” of which a full account is given by A. de Gubernatis in his “Zoological Mythology” (i. 159–161), taken from Dr. Löwe’s excellent translation of Kreutzwald’s collection (“Ehstnische Märchen,” No. 9). In it the thunder-god is robbed of his bagpipes (toru-pil, “Röhreninstrument”) by the devil, who hides it away in hell, keeping it in an iron chamber guarded by seven locks. The consequence is [lvi]that the clouds no longer yield a drop of rain. The thunder-god, under the form of a boy, obtains access to hell, and persuades the devil to let him play on the magic bagpipes. Thereupon “the walls of hell quaked, and the devil and his associates fainted away and fell to the ground as though dead.” Returning home, the thunder-god “blew into his thunder-instrument till the rain-gates opened and gave the earth to drink.” The termination of the history of Suśroṇī is closely akin to that with which all complete variants of the “Puss in Boots” story should end. They ought always to conclude with the ingratitude of the hero or heroine of the tale to the cat or fox or other animal which has made itself useful. The Marquis de Carabas ought to have proved ungrateful to the Booted Cat, just as Suśroṇī neglected to give her benefactor, the jackal, the daily meat which she had promised it. The asseverations of the king’s wives in this story, and those of the hero and heroine of No. 18, may be compared with the similar affirmations of the heroine of the 26th of M. Legrand’s “Contes Populaires Grecs.” In it a king suffers from a strange malady, three branches having grown over his heart. His disguised sister tells him her story, and adds, “If I tell the truth, O my king, may one of the branches break which is over your heart!” By three such asseverations she breaks all three branches.
The story (No. 13) of the actor who dramatises the life of Buddha, and is punished for his audacity in making fun of the Six Bhikshus, soars high above the region of folk-lore. And there is but little in European popular fiction which can be likened to the legend of “The Dumb Cripple” (No. 14), who pretended to be unable to speak or walk, in order that he might not be made a king, reflecting that, “if he were to be invested with sovereign power, this would not be a good thing, seeing that in consequence of a sixty years’ reign which he had accomplished in a previous state of existence, he had been born again in hell, and that he now ran the risk of going to hell [lvii]a second time.” The same remark holds good of the not very edifying history of Ṛshyaśringa or Gazelle Horn (No. 15), the ascetic who, out of spite, prevents rain from falling until his asceticism and his magic power collapse together.
The story of Viśvaṇtara (No. 16), the princely Bodisat, who not only gives away all his property and retires into the forest of penance, but even surrenders his two children to a cruel slave-owner, and finally hands over his wife to a stranger who demands her, has been already told by Mr. Spence Hardy in his “Manual of Buddhism” (pp. 116–124), under the title of “The Wessantara Játaka;” but as it is one of the most touching of the class of legends to which it belongs, having in it more of human interest than such narratives generally contain, and as the Tibetan variant is the more poetic and pathetic of the two renderings of the tale, Professor Schiefner has done good service by translating it. Such acts of renunciation as the princely Bodisat accomplished do not commend themselves to the Western mind. An Oriental story-teller can describe a self-sacrificing monarch as cutting slices of flesh off his own arms and plunging them into the fire in honour of a deity, and yet not be afraid of exciting anything but a religious thrill among his audience. To European minds such a deed would probably appear grotesque. And so the Eastern tales in praise of self-sacrifice do not seem to have impressed the lay mind of Europe. On ecclesiastical literature they probably exerted considerable influence. But folk-tales do not often deal with such heroic operations as were performed by Prince Viśvaṇtara in cutting himself loose from all worldly ties in order that nothing might prevent him from becoming the consummate Buddha. The sorrows of Madrī, the princely ascetic’s wife, who is reduced by her husband’s passion for giving everything away first to exile and poverty, then to bitter grief on account of the loss of her dearly loved little children, and finally to slavery, but who submits to all her husband’s commands, may be [lviii]compared with those of the patient Grisildes whose praises Chaucer has sung in “The Clerke’s Tale.” The Clerk states in his prologue that the story was one which he “lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,” whose name was “Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete;” Petrarch having freely translated it in the year 1373 from Boccaccio’s “Decamerone.” This story, however, appears to have been current in Italy for some time before. In folk-tales the similar sorrows of a wife who is condemned to a series of humiliations by a harsh husband are often described; but the husband’s conduct is generally accounted for by the fact that his wife had at first rejected him with contumely, and he had made up his mind to retaliate. Patient Grissel’s husband had absolutely no excuse to plead for his cruelty, nor can much be said in extenuation of that of such a husband as the German “King Thrushbeard” (Grimm, No. 52), the Norwegian “Hacon Grizzlebeard” (“Tales from the Norse,” No. 6), or the Italian “King of Fairland,” the husband of the proud Cintiella (Basile’s “Pentamerone,” No. 40). The Russian variant of “Patient Grissel’s Story” (Afanasief, v. No. 29) seems worthy of mention, as not being likely to be familiar to Western Europe. A king marries a peasant’s daughter on condition that she shall never find fault with anything he says or does. She makes him an excellent wife, and never opposes his will, even when he takes her children from her, pretending that they are to be put to death, in order that his neighbours might not laugh at them as being sprung from a peasant mother; or when he sends her back to her father’s hut, and then recalls her from it as a servant, and orders her to get ready the room intended for his new bride. But the Russian story, as it stands alone (with the exception of the opening), is probably an echo from abroad.51 [lix]
In the Nidānakathā or “The Three Epochs” (translated in Mr. Rhys Davids’s “Buddhist Birth-Stories,” p. 33), there is an account of the great generosity of Mangala Buddha. “The story is, that when he was performing the duties of a Bodhisatta, being in an existence corresponding to the Vessentara existence,52 he dwelt with his wife and children on a mountain.” One day a demon named “Sharp-fang,” hearing of his readiness to bestow gifts, “approached him in the guise of a Brahmin, and asked the Bodhisatta for his two children. The Bodhisatta, exclaiming, “I give my children to the Brahmin,” cheerfully and joyfully gave up both the children, thereby causing the ocean-girt earth to quake. The demon, standing by the bench at the end of the cloistered walk, while the Bodhisatta looked on, devoured the children like a bunch of roots. Not a particle of sorrow arose in the Bodhisatta as he looked on the demon, and saw his mouth as soon as he opened it disgorging streams of blood like flames of fire; nay, a great joy and satisfaction welled within him as he thought, ‘My gift was well given,’ and he put up the prayer, ‘By the merit of this deed may rays of light one day issue from me in this very way.’ In consequence of this prayer of his it was that the rays emitted from his body when he became Buddha filled so vast a sphere.” Another strange Indian story about self-sacrifice is that of the Dānava or Titan Namuchi,53 who “did not refuse to give anything to anybody that asked, even if he were his enemy.” Having practised asceticism for ten thousand years “as a drinker of smoke,” he was allowed by Brahmā to become, like Balder, proof against all the ordinary forces of nature. After that he frequently made war against Indra, and often overcame him. When the gods and the Asuras churned the ocean of milk with the mountain Mandara, Namuchi received, as his share in the products [lx]of the churning, a horse which had the power of restoring to life, by a sniff, any Asura whom the gods had killed. This gave him great power. At length Indra went to Namuchi and asked for that horse as a gift. Namuchi gave it, and Indra, “as he could not be slain by any other weapon, killed him with foam of the Ganges, in which he had placed a thunderbolt.” However, he was born again as “an Asura composed all of jewels,” and he conquered Indra a hundred times. “Then the gods took counsel together, and came to him, and said to him, ‘By all means give us your body for a human sacrifice.’ When he heard that, he gave them his own body, although they were his enemies: noble men do not turn their backs on a suppliant, but bestow on him even their lives.”
The story of a charitable monarch, whose uprightness and generosity are put to a severe test by a deity, occurs as a folk-tale in Miss Maive Stokes’s “Indian Fairy Tales” (No. 13). It properly belongs to literature, in which it has assumed various forms, one of which has been made known to English readers by the late Sir Mutu Coomāra Swāmy in his “Arichandra, or the Martyr of Truth; a Drama translated from the Tamil.” The story as told by an Indian ayah takes this form. There was a king named Harchand, who “used to pray a great deal to God, and God was very fond of him,” but thought fit to test his goodness. So one day, when he had promised an ascetic “two pounds and a half of gold,” all his wealth was turned into charcoal. In order to keep his word, Harchand was obliged to sell his wife and child for a pound and a half of gold, and then he sold himself for the other pound. Having become the property of “a Dom, that is, a man of a very low caste, who kept a tank into which it was his business to throw the bodies of those who died,” he was charged with the care of the tank, and ordered to take a rupee in payment for each adult corpse, eight annas for a dead child, or a piece of cloth, in case the bearers of the body had no money. One day his wife arrived, bearing [lxi]the corpse of his son, who had died. She had no money, but she said to herself, “I know that man is my husband, so he will not take any money for throwing his child into the water.” But he was so honest, in the interests of his master, that he insisted upon a fee, which had to be paid at the expense of his wife’s single covering. Eventually all went well, the dead boy was restored to life, and when the reunited royal family returned home, “the garden was in splendid beauty; the charcoal was turned back into gold, and silver, and jewels; the servants were in waiting as usual, and they went into the palace and lived happily for evermore.”
The principal theme of “The Fulfilled Prophecy” (No. 17) is one that often occurs in popular tales, many of which are devoted to proving how impossible it is for a man, whatever crimes he may commit, to escape from his destiny. The “Two Brothers” (No. 18) is one of the great cycle of moral tales in which goodness is contrasted with badness, to the temporary advantage but eventual discomfiture of the latter. The blinding of the good brother by the bad is an incident suggestive of the opening of the well-known folk-tales of “True and Untrue” (“Tales from the Norse,” No. 1), the “Two Wanderers” (Grimm, No. 107), and a great number of similar stories, to many of which references are given in vol. iii. p. 189, of Grimm’s collection.
Stories about ungrateful wives are popular in Asia. In No. 21, “How a woman requites love,” a husband twice saves his wife’s life, once by rescuing her from his brothers, who proposed to feed upon her when destitute of other food in a desert, and again by supplying her with food and drink, much to his own inconvenience, when she was faint from hunger and thirst. “He sliced some flesh off his thighs,” says the narrator, “and gave it to her to eat; and then he opened the veins of both his arms and gave her the blood to drink.” In spite of which, she conspired against him with a handless and footless cripple. [lxii]In one of the Indian variants of the story (“Panchatantra,” iv. 5), the husband’s self-sacrifice takes a more poetic form. In the midst of a forest a wife suffered intensely from thirst. Her husband went to seek water. When he came back with some his wife was dead. A voice was heard saying that if he would give up half of his own life hers would be renewed. He immediately pronounced a formula by which he surrendered half of his life, and his wife was thereby resuscitated. Soon afterwards, being in a garden one day during the absence of her husband, she heard a cripple singing so beautifully that she fell in love with him at once. So she took an early opportunity of pushing her husband into a well. After which she led a wandering life, carrying about the cripple in a basket on her head. But her husband, who had not been killed by his fall, escaped from the well, and at length confronted her one day in the presence of a king, and demanded back the half of his life which he had given her. She uttered formal words of surrender and fell dead. The Indian variant of the story in the Daśakumāracharita is closely akin to the Tibetan, the husband assuaging his wife’s hunger and thirst by means of his own flesh and blood, and being rewarded by being pushed into a well by his wife, who had fallen in love with a cripple whose hands, feet, nose, and ears had been cut off by robbers.54 This story appears to be the original of a singular Mongol tale (Jülg’s “Mongolische Märchen,” p. 105). A man and his wife were walking along near a cliff, when they heard so lovely a voice resounding that the woman said to herself, “I should like to belong to the man who possesses so charming a voice,” and she proceeded to push her husband into a well. Then she set off in search of the possessor of the voice. When she found him, he turned out to be a loathsome invalid, whose groans [lxiii]had been rendered melodious by the echoing cliff. Full of remorse, she tried to make up for the murder of her husband by carrying away the invalid, under whose disagreeable weight she pined away and eventually died (Benfey, “Panchatantra,” i. pp. 436–444). The form assumed by the story in the Kathā Sarit Sāgara55 is almost identical with that in the Kah-gyur. The end, however, is more savage in the Indian than in the Tibetan variant. After the ungratefulness of the wife had been exposed, the king’s ministers “cut off her nose and ears and branded her, and banished her from the country with the maimed man. And in this matter Fate showed a becoming combination, for it united a woman without nose and ears with a man without hands and feet.” In the “Three Snake Leaves” (Grimm, No. 16), a wife who has been resuscitated after her death by her husband conspires against him with a ship-captain and has him flung into the sea. He is saved, however, and she and her accomplice are ultimately discovered and sentenced to be drowned.
The story of “The Grateful Animals and the Ungrateful Man” (No. 26) is one that is very widely spread throughout Asia, and has made its way into many parts of Europe. The merits of the lower animals were, in Eastern stories, frequently contrasted with the demerits of man, so far at least as gratitude is concerned, many centuries before such ideas as have in modern times led to the formation of societies for the protection of animals had exercised any influence over European thought. In the present instance a hunter, who draws out of a pit a lion, a snake, a mouse, a falcon, and a man, is rewarded by the two beasts, the bird, and the reptile, and by their aid is enabled to escape from prison, after having been thrown into it in consequence of the machinations of the man he had saved. In the “Panchatantra” (Appendix to Book i. story 2) a Brahman rescues a tiger, a monkey, a snake, and a man, with similar results. From the work of which [lxiv]the “Panchatantra” is the Sanskrit representative, the story made its way, about 750 A.D., into the Syriac “Kalilag and Damnag,” and the Arabic “Kalilah and Dimnah,” and thence, about 1080 A.D., into Symeon Seth’s Greek translation from the Arabic, and the Latin translation (through the Hebrew) by Joannes of Capua in the second half of the thirteenth century, and so into the Spanish, German, French, Italian, and English translations of different versions of the Arabic work.56 It occurs also in other works of Buddhistic origin. In a story from the Rasavāhinī, quoted by Spiegel in his “Anecdota Pālica,” an inhabitant of Benares rescues from a hole a dog, a snake, and a man. The dog and the snake are grateful, and by their means their rescuer is enabled to escape the impalement to which he had been condemned in consequence of the malice of the ungrateful man he had rescued along with them. There can be little doubt that it was from Indian, and probably Buddhistic, sources that such grateful animals made their way into European folk-tales—as the ants, fish, and birds of the “White Snake” (Grimm, No. 17); the lions, bears, wolves, foxes, and hares of “The Two Brothers” (No. 60); the ants, ducks, and bees of “The Queen Bee” (No. 62); the horse, ducks, stork, and bees of “The Two Wanderers” (No. 107); and the bear, mouse, and monkey of “The Faithful Beasts” (Grimm, 104 of first edition, afterwards omitted); not to speak of the numberless counterparts of these grateful creatures in the folk-tales of every European land.
Of the rest of the stories, the greater part belong to the class of animal fables. Many of them are old acquaintances under a new guise. “The Ungrateful Lion” (No. 27), for instance, which tells how a woodpecker extracted a bone from a lion’s throat, and was supposed by the lion to be sufficiently paid for his trouble by its escape from his jaws, closely resembles the fable of the wolf which paid [lxv]in similar coin its long-billed benefactor. “The Wolf and the Sheep” (No. 29) is the familiar fable of “The Wolf and the Lamb,” but the final argument of the wolf is different. The story of the ass which insists upon singing at the wrong time, and so is caught trespassing, and is punished (No. 32), has made its mark in European literature. The jackal which acts as arbiter between the two otters (No. 34), and takes as its share the main part of the fish they catch, leaving only the head and tail for them, closely resembles the well-known legal eater of the disputed oyster and presenter of the oyster-shells to the two claimants who had referred their dispute to his decision. The moral of the tale in which the lion is saved by the jackal (No. 35) is the same as that of the fable of the netted lion which the mouse rescued by gnawing its bonds. The blue-stained jackal (No. 36) is one of the disguised animals about which many fables are current in the West, such as the ass in the lion’s hide, or the cat which fell into a shoemaker’s tub, and afterwards played the part of a nun. And the monkeys which see the reflection of the moon in a well, and think that it has fallen out of the sky into the water, and form themselves into a chain whereby to draw it out (No. 45), are closely related to the foolish persons of the Wise Men of Gotham class, to whom various similar follies are attributed in many lands. [1]
1 “Buddhism,” by T. W. Rhys Davids (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), pp. 199–211 and 250. ↑
2 “Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism” (being the Hibbert Lectures for 1881), pp. 189–192. ↑
3 Whose statements are based upon those made by C. F. Köppen, in his standard work upon “Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche.” ↑
4 “Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen: Aus dem Mongolischen übersetzt von Isaac Jacob Schmidt,” pp. 25–27. St. Petersburg, 1829. ↑
5 According to Schlagintweit, “ ‘Constructed Vessel,’ a work on moral subjects forming part of the Kanjur.” ↑
9 In Hungarian his name would be written Körösi Csoma Sándor; in French, Alexandre Csoma de Körös; in English, he signed himself Alexander Csoma Körösi, the name Körösi being an adjectival form, meaning “of Körös.” ↑
10 The exact date of his birth has not been ascertained, but one of his Hungarian biographers states that he was about thirty when he started eastward in 1820. Another asserts that he was born in the Transylvanian village of Körös, on the 4th of April 1784. ↑
11 In a letter, containing a brief sketch of his life up to that time, which was published in 1834 in the first volume of the “Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,” and from which are taken the passages cited above as quotations. ↑
13 Quoted by Dr. Campbell from an editorial article by Professor H. H. Wilson in the supplement to the Government Gazette of 9th July 1829. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. xi., part 1, p. 305. A second article by Dr. Campbell, including a letter from Lieut.-Colonel Lloyd, was published in vol. xiv., part 2, pp. 823–827. ↑
14 In an interesting article on Tibet in the Revue des Deux Mondes, vme série, tom. 19 (July 1847). ↑
15 “The work of Csoma de Körös is that of an original investigator, and the fruit of almost unparalleled determination and patience,” says H. A. Jäschke, in the preface to his “Tibetan-English Dictionary.” ↑
16 Colonel Lloyd says that he thinks Csoma Körösi remained at Titalya till November 1837. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. xiv., part 2. ↑
17 Dr. Malan is not certain about the date of his first interview with Csoma Körösi, but his Tibetan lessons began not later than August 1838. ↑
18 For this piece of information I am indebted to Lieut.-Col. T. W. Lewin, who has himself been our Resident at Darjíling, and who availed himself of his stay in Sikkim to study the Tibetan language, of which he has published a Manual. ↑
20 “Die Ungarische Sprachwissenschaft,” Literarische Berichte aus Ungarn. Budapest, 1877. Bd. i., heft i., pp. 54–97. For this and other references to Hungarian works and German works published in Hungary, I am indebted to Mr. E. D. Butler, of the British Museum, whose acquaintance with Hungarian literature has led to his being elected an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. ↑
23 M. Léon Feer has adopted the form Kandjour in his translation of Csoma Körösis’s “Analysis” (Annales du Musée Guimet, tom. 2); but he says in a footnote to p. 143, “J’écris Kandjour contrairement à mes principes d’orthographe, parce que Kandjour est une forme qui imite la prononciation et n’est point du tout le calque du mot tibétain.” ↑
25 Csoma Körösi’s analysis of the Tibetan sacred books has been translated by M. Léon Feer, and was published in 1881 under the title of “Analyse du Kandjour et du Tandjour,” in the second volume of the “Annales du Musée Guimet,” the sumptuous work due to the munificence of M. Guimet. M. Feer has appended to his translation a most useful “Vocabulaire de l’Analyse du Kandjour,” giving all the names which occur in Csoma Körösi’s Analysis, with the explanations it contains, together with an index and a “Table Alphabétique des Ouvrages du Kandjour,” and several appendixes. The fourth volume of the “Annales du Musée Guimet” is to consist of “Extraits du Kandjour,” translated by M. Léon Feer. ↑
26 In a very interesting paper printed in the “Bulletin Historico-Philologique de l’Académie de Saint-Pétersbourg,” tom. iv., 1848, pp. 321–339. ↑
27 In an account of the works, in the languages of Eastern Asia, belonging to the library of the University of St. Petersburg, printed in the “Mélanges Asiatiques” of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, tom. ii., 1856. ↑
28 A complete list of Professor Schiefner’s writings is given in a memoir by F. Wiedemann, read at a meeting of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, December 11, 1879, and reprinted in the 16th volume of the “Russische Revue.” From this it appears that he was born at Reval in 1817, the son of a merchant who had migrated thither from Bohemia; he studied in the University of St. Petersburg from 1836 to 1840, and then for two years in the University of Berlin. In 1848 he was appointed one of the librarians of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, of which he became a member a few years later. ↑
29 For special information about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism the following works may be consulted:—Emil Schlagintweit’s “Buddhism in Tibet,” London, 1863; C. F. Köppen’s “Die Religion des Buddha,” Berlin, 1857–59, the second volume, entitled “Die lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche;” the “Souvenirs d’un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le Tíbet, et la Chine, pendant les années 1844, 1845, 1846,” Paris, 1853, by the French missionaries MM. Huc and Gabet, and “Le Christianisme en Chine, en Tartarie, et en Thibet,” by the same authors; P. E. Foucaux’s “Rgya Tch’er Rol Pa, or Développement des Jeux, Traduit sur la version Tibétaine du Bhahhgyour, et revu sur l’original Sanskrit (Lalitavistâra),” Paris, 1848, containing an immense amount of valuable information in the Introduction and the Notes; Eugène Burnouf’s “Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien,” Paris, 1844, and “Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi,” Paris, 1852; the “Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, edited with Notes, an Introduction, &c., by Clements R. Markham,” London, 1876, the Introduction containing a great deal of interesting information about Tibet and its explorers; Brian H. Hodgson’s “Essays on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of Nepál and Tibet,” London, 1874; General A. Cunningham’s “Ladák,” 1854; A. A. Georgi’s “Alphabetum Tibetanum,” Rom, 1762; Colonel Yule’s “Cathay;” the “Travels in the Himalayan,” by W. Moorcroft and G. Trebeck, London, 1841; Isaac Jacob Schmidt’s “Forschungen im Gebiete der älteren religiösen, politischen und literarischen Bildungsgeschichte der Völker Mittel-Asiens, vorzüglich der Mongolen und Tibeter,” St. Petersburg, 1824, his translation from the Tibetan of the “Dsanglun, der Weise und der Thor,” St. Petersburg, 1843, and his “Index des Kanjur,” St. Petersburg, 1845; T. D. Thomson’s “Western Himálaya and Tibet,” London, 1852; L. Torrens’s “Travels in Ladâk, &c.,” London, 1862; S. Turner’s “Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet,” London, 1800; G. T. Vigne’s “Travels in Kashmír, Ladak, &c.,” London, 1842; Col. Prjevalsky’s “Mongolia, &c.,” translated by E. D. Morgan, London, 1876; the French and German translations of V. Vasilief’s Russian work on Buddhism; Anton Schiefner’s “Tibetanische Studien,” and a great number of articles in periodicals, the titles of which are given in the list by E. Schlagintweit, from which most of the foregoing references are [xxxvi]taken. Among linguistic works may be mentioned Csoma Körösi’s “Grammar of the Tibetan Language,” Calcutta, 1834, and his “Essay towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English,” Calcutta, 1834; I. J. Schmidt’s “Grammatik der Tibetanische Sprache,” St. Petersburg, 1839, and his “Tibetisch deutsches Wörterbuch,” St. Petersburg, 1841 (an adaptation for a German public, according to Jäschke, of Csoma Körösi’s work); P. E. Foucaux’s “Grammaire de la Langue Tibétaine,” Paris, 1858; Col. T. W. Lewin’s “Manual of Tibetan,” Calcutta, 1879; and what is now the standard work on the subject, H. A. Jäschke’s “Tibetan-English Dictionary,” London, 1881. ↑
30 An account of the different classes of stories which turn upon wishes has been given by Benfey, “Panchatantra,” i. 496–499. ↑
32 With the story of his birth may be compared the similar account of the birth of Śṛingabhuja in the Kathá Sarit Ságara. See Mr. Tawney’s translation, vol. i. p. 355. ↑
33 Book xii. chap. 72, vol. ii. p. 180 of Mr. C. H. Tawney’s most valuable translation, now being published in the “Bibliotheca Indica” by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. ↑
36 The story of the suitors whom Viśākhā shut up in chests and put to shame occurs as a folk-tale in Miss Maive Stokes’s “Indian Fairy Tales,” No. 28, “The Clever Wife.” ↑
38 A good account of the story is given by Sir George Cox in his “Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” i. 111–121. ↑
39 “Ueber einige morgenländische Fassungen der Rhampsinit Sage,” in the “Bulletin” of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, tom. xiv. pp. 299–315. ↑
41 Sakellarios, “Cypriaques,” iii., p. 157. Quoted by M. Émile Legrand in his “Recueil de Contes populaires grecs.” Paris, 1881. Pp. 205–216. ↑
42 “Kathá Sarit Ságara,” book x. chap. lxiii. The story occurs in vol. ii. part 7, of Mr. Tawney’s translation. Calcutta, 1881. ↑
43 J. F. Campbell’s “Tales from the West Highlands,” No. 18, on which see the exhaustive notes by Reinhold Köhler in “Orient und Occident,” ii. 303. ↑
44 For a full account of “swan-maidens” and the mediæval romance of “The Knight of the Swan,” see Baring Gould’s “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.” ↑
46 E. Legrand, “Contes Populaires Grecs,” Paris, 1881, pp. 228–230. The story is European by language only, not by domicile, for it was found at Smyrna. ↑
50 “The same power of the wind which is signified by the harp of Orpheus is seen in the story of Amphion” (Cox’s “Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” ii. 249). “The pipe is a symbol of the storm-song (of the Maruts) which makes all things dance” (Mannhardt, “Germanische Mythen,” p. 174). ↑
51 The bibliography of the Griselda story is given at length by Dr. Reinhold Köhler, in an article fifteen columns long, in Erschand Gruber’s “Allgemeine Encyklopädie,” section i., vol. xci. Leipzig, 1871. ↑