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A History of Sanskrit Literature c18.s1: 1. The Origin of the Fable

A History of Sanskrit Literature c18.s1

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English

1. The Origin of the Fable

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WE may safely assume that from the earliest times of the life of the Vedic Indians in India tales of all sorts passed current among the people, however useless it may be to discriminate them as fairy tales, Märchen, or myths or fables in the earlier stages of their development. It was, however, a distinct and important step when the mere story became used for a definite purpose, and when the didactic fable became a definite mode of inculcating useful knowledge. We do not know at what date this took place; we could not expect to find fables in the *Ṛgveda*, but we have there something which reminds us how easy it was for Indian thought to transfer to men's neighbours the habits of men. Whatever be the purpose of a famous hymn in the *Ṛgveda*¹ in which Brahmins are compared to croaking frogs as they sing at their sacrifice, it is clear that we have a recognition of a certain kinship between men and animals, which comes out clearly in the Upaniṣads,² where we have the allegory or satire of the dogs who search out a leader to howl food for them, the talk of two flamingoes whose remarks call attention to Raikva, and the instruction of the young Satyakāma first by a bull, then by a flamingo, then by an aquatic bird. Granting that we have not here the didactic fable, in which the actions of beasts are made the means of advising men, still we can realize how easy it was to pass to this form of instruction, and in fact we find in the epic³ clear recognition of fables, and that not merely in the late didactic book xii but elsewhere. Not only do we hear of the bird that provided the equivalent of the golden eggs, but of the naughty cat which deceived the little mice by an appearance of virtue so that they delivered themselves into her power, and we have a *motif* which certainly is strongly suggestive of the material whence developed the *Pañcatantra*. The Pāṇḍavas, it is suggested, are to be treated as the intelligent jackal treated his allies the tiger, the mouse, the ichneumon, and the wolf, when he smartly cheated them out of any share in the booty he had won with their aid. About the same time,¹ as the monumental evidence at Bharhut proves, the Buddhists were already making another use of the common belief in the close relationship of animals and man, now accentuated by the adoption by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains alike of the doctrine of transmigration into animal as well as human forms. They chose by relating beast stories to illustrate the deeds and greatness of the Buddha and his contemporaries in past births.

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¹ vii. 103.

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² *Chāndogya Upaniṣad*, i. 12; iv. 1; 5; 7 f.

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³ Holtzmann, *Das Mahābhārata*, iv. 88 ff.

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¹ *Mem. Arch. Surv. India*, i (1919), 15. On the question of dates cf. R. C. Majumdar, JPASB. 1922, pp. 225 ff.

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We may confidently assume from the epic and from allusions to proverbs in Patañjali² that the beast fable was thus current, but we cannot say with any certainty whether fables had yet come to be reduced to literary form of any kind. The answer may be in the negative, for the fable as we have it in the *Pañcatantra* is indeed an elaborate production despite its seeming lack of art. It is essentially didactic, and thus must consist in part of a tale, but in part also of a moral or maxim of practical life—which may, of course, not be moral in the higher sense of the term. The fable, indeed, is essentially connected with the two branches of science known by Indians as the *Nītiçāstra* and the *Arthaçāstra*, which have this in common as opposed to the *Dharmaçāstra* that they are not codes of morals, but deal with man's action in practical politics and conduct of the ordinary affairs of every-day life and intercourse. We must not, however, exaggerate the contrast between these Çāstras, for in the *Arthaçāstra* and the *Nītiçāstra* alike there is much common sense, and that is often in accord with practical morality; at no time can we regard the didactic fable as intended merely to extol cleverness without regard to morality; there lingers around the work a distinct influence of the *Dharmaçāstra*, as was only to be expected, seeing that the *Pañcatantra* was intended for the instruction of the young and the instructors were Brahmins. But the youthful pupils were evidently not intended to be Brahmin boys either solely or mainly; tradition enshrined in the *Pañcatantra* itself asserts its composition for the instruction of the sons of a prince, and with this accords the use of Sanskrit, for at the probable time of its first production, Sanskrit was already essentially the language of the Brahmins and of the high official classes in the royal *entourage*. A work of this sort, it is evident, was a very definite creation, something vastly different from mere tales regarding beasts or even the simple fable as it may have passed current orally.

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² On Pāṇini, ii. 1. 3; v. 3. 106 f.; Weber, IS. xiii. 486.

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The form of the fable is essentially dictated by its origin. The story is naturally related in prose, but the moral is fixed in the memory by being put in verse form, and it is natural that other didactic verses should be strewn in the tales; such an employment of gnomic stanzas is found in the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa*.¹ The maxim embodying the truth or point of the tale naturally stands in a different position from the more general didactic stanza; it must be capable of serving as an identification label, or Kathāsaṁgrahaçloka, a verse that sums up the tale. It must, however, have been natural on the basis of such stanzas to insert in the narrative itself stanzas which are not maxims, but, like the label, refer definitely to the tale itself, and thus we achieve the use of Ākhyāna or narrative verses, but primarily at any rate as a minor feature. It is only slowly and late that the didactic fable comes to be written wholly or largely in verse.

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¹ vii. 13 ff.

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Yet another peculiarity marks the form of the fable. It was a distinctly artistic touch to complicate and enlarge the theme, not merely by combining a number of fables to form a book, but to interweave the fables so that the whole would become a unity. This involved making the characters in the fables support their maxims by allusions to other fables, which they necessarily are asked to tell, resulting that in a fable others are normally inserted, while the process may even be carried so far as to include in such an inserted fable another inserted fable. There is, of course, nothing simple or popular in such a form; indeed, it is highly inconvenient for merely practical purposes, as the thread of the main narrative may be so interrupted as to render return to it difficult; it must have been the invention of some definite person or persons. For models we can only refer vaguely to the love of direct speech shown in the epics where, if possible, the actor is made to relate his own deeds, as does Odysseus among the Phaiacians. Nor would it be reasonable to doubt that those who introduced these important changes into the form of the fable, as contrasted with the simpler form we must presume it once had, were responsible for inventing many of the fables which they tell. From the popular fable they may well have borrowed a good deal in substance, but in adapting it for very definite didactic ends they must have vitally changed it. We can support this view by the wholesale alterations evidently made in the conception of fables by the Buddhists in the Jātaka bock.

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In view of these facts it is clear that it is not possible to speak of a Prākrit fable literature as being the precursor of the *Pañcatantra*. We have no reason whatever to suppose that any real parallel to the structure of the *Pañcatantra* ever existed, and we cannot even say that the substance of the individual tales was current among the people until much later, when the popularity of the *Pañcatantra* led to the wholesale effort to appropriate them for the humbler ranks of society much as apparently happened in the case of Aesop's fables. We may go further and hold that the fable was far more of an independent creation in Sanskrit than the popular tale or Märchen, which is free from the didactic aim of the fable and expresses much more directly the religious feelings of the people, their myth-making capacity, their belief in magic in all aspects, and the native ingenuity of humble narrators. It is in entire harmony with this obvious distinction that Indian tradition is as positive regarding the Prākrit original of the great collections of Märchen as it is silent on the existence of any Prākrit source of the *Pañcatantra*.

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Clear distinctions in literature, as in everything else, are not common in Sanskrit, and no terminology was invented by writers on poetics to discriminate between the fable and the tale, though as regards the tale itself some efforts were made to discriminate the species of Kathā or Ākhyāyikā, though without success.¹ The stories in the several books of the *Pañcatantra* are styled Kathās, while in one version the title is *Tantrākhyāyika*. The terms themselves merely denote, Ākhyāyikā, narrative, sometimes minor narrative, Kathā, conversation, story, and it was hardly possible to discriminate them seriously. Nor are in fact in the *Pañcatantra* fables, tales, and narratives of actual or possible human events rigidly discriminated; it differs from the tales in that the fable element with its didactic stanzas decidedly prevails over other elements, while the tale includes the fable merely as a lesser constituent. Both profit by this absence of rigidity, which permits either a richer content and more elaborate development. Even so late a work as the *Hitopadeça* knows how to seek variety by blending the beast fable with Märchen and spicy narratives of human life.

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¹ Cf. S. K. Dé, *BSOS.* iii. 507 ff.

Cites (13)