A History of Sanskrit Literature: Classical Period, Vol. I c4.s7.1

c4.s7.1

The Buddhist anecdotal literature perhaps reflects an aspect of the literary, as well as popular, taste of the time, which liked the telling of tales in a simple and unadorned, but distinctly elegant, manner; for the origin of the Sanskrit *Pañcatantra* and the Prakrit *Bṛhatkathā*, which represent story-telling from another point of view, is perhaps synchronous, although the various extant versions of the two works belong to a much later period. The Avadāna, the didactic beast-fable and the popular tale are indeed not synonymous. While the Avadāna, closely related to the Jātaka, is clearly distinguishable as a Buddhist *gest*, which has a definite religious significance, the other two species are purely secular in object and character. The method of story-telling is also different; for in the Jātaka or Avadāna, we have generally the application of a past legend to a tale of to-day. In the Jātaka the Bodhisattva tells a tale of his past experience, but it is not narrated in the first person ; the device of first-hand narrative as well as of enclosing a tale, is a feature which characterises the classical method. The Sanskrit poetic theory ignores the Jātaka and Avadāna, presumably because they have a religious objective and seldom rises to the level of art, but it does not also clearly define and discriminate between the fable and the tale. The elaborate attempt to distinguish between the Kathā and the Ākhyāyikā,¹ as the invented story and the traditional legend respectively, is more or less academic, and has hardly any application to the present case. Some of the stories of the *Pañcatantra* are indeed called Kathās, but one of the versions of the entire work is styled *Tantrākhyāyikā*, while Guṇāḍhya's work is designated as the Great Kathā. Possibly no fine distinction is meant, and the terms Kathā and Ākhyāyikā are employed here in the general sense of story. A rigid differentiation, however, cannot perhaps be made in practice between the fable and the tale ; for the different elements in each are not entirely excluded in the other, nor isolated. The beast-fable, as typified by the *Pañcatantra*, is not seldom enriched by folk-tale and spicy stories of human adventure, while the tale, as represented by *Bṛhatkathā*, sometimes becomes complex by absorbing some of the elements of the fable and its didactic motive. Both these types, again, should be distinguished from the prose romance, the so-called Kathā and Ākhyāyikā, such as the *Harṣa-carita* and the *Kādambarī*, in which all the graces and refinements of the Kāvya are transferred from verse to prose, either to create an exuberantly fanciful story or to vivify and transform a legend or folk-tale.