The Music of Hindostan c8.s1.28

c8.s1.28

To the *vīṇā*, the national instrument, there are so many references, both direct and allusive, that it is difficult to choose. Perhaps one story, from the Jātakas, will be enough. A feeble musician, Mūsila of Ujjain, whose music on the *vīṇā* was 'like scratching on a mat', came to learn of Guttila of Banāras (the Bodhisatta in an earlier birth). Guttila’s parents when they heard him said, ‘Shoo! Shoo! The rats are gnawing the vīṇā to pieces.’ Guttila who, as Bodhisatta, was ‘skilled in discerning from the lineaments of the body’ said, ‘Go, my son, this art is not for you.’ But Mūsila got his way; and Guttila Bodhisatta, who ‘did not stint his knowledge’, at last pronounced his pupil perfect. Mūsila pressed to be taken into the king’s service. This was done; but the king awarded Guttila twice as much as his pupil. Mūsila protested, and forced matters to a contest, of which proclamation was made to tuck of drum. The Bodhisatta reflected that he was old, and that ‘if he beats me, death in the woods is better than the shame which will be my portion’. So to the woods he went; but ‘kept returning through fear of death, and going back to the wood for fear of shame’, so that ‘the grass died as he walked and his feet wore away a path’. In his trouble Sakka, the king of the gods, appeared. Guttila was to break, in the contest, one string after another, beginning at the ‘beestring’, and the music should be as good as before. ‘Then you shall go on playing with nothing but the body; and from the ends of the broken strings the sound shall go forth and fill all the land of Banāras for the space of twelve leagues.’ All happened as was foretold, and the scholar, beaten out of the field, was stoned and torn in pieces by the populace.