A History of Sanskrit Literature c19.s5.6

c19.s5.6

We may admit at once that despite his efforts Somadeva has not succeeded in producing a unified work. But the merit of the *Kathāsaritsāgara* does not rest on construction. It stands on the solid fact that Somadeva has presented in an attractive and elegant if simple and unpretentious form a very large number of stories which have for us a very varied appeal, either as amusing or gruesome or romantic or as appealing to our love of wonders on sea and land, or as affording parallels to tales familiar from childhood. Kṣemendra’s example shows how, by undue condensation and obscurity, tales can lose all point and interest; Somadeva, how by care the point can be fully expressed without fatigue to the reader. We meet with the old but still amusing tales of fools, scattered in the *Kathāsaritsāgara* among the tales of its version of the *Pañcatantra*, but collected together after it by Kṣemendra; chance proves that half at least go back to a collection made before A. D. 450, used in a work by a monk Ārya Saṅghasena, and rendered into Chinese by his pupil Guṇavṛddhi in 492.¹ We hear once more of the foolish servants who, bidden protect the leather of the new trunks, take out the clothes in them and thus protect them against the rain, of the fool who insists that his father never violated chastity and that he must have been a mind-born son, of the fellow who filled himself with seven cakes and then bitterly lamented that he had not eaten the seventh first and saved the rest, and we may, if young enough, still laugh with the stones at these japes. Rogues who prosper lend another series of tales; one is ingenious; dressed as a rich merchant, he craved an interview with the king, to whom he promised for the honour of a daily repetition of the audience a gift each time of 500 *dīnāras*; the king accedes, and the courtiers, thinking that he is all-powerful with their master, bribe him until he has fifty million gold pieces, which he has the good sense to share with the king to whom he reveals his effective ruse. Much is told also of the thief, gambler, roué, but always brilliant Mūladeva,² who is in Indian literature the *beau idéal* of a perfect cheat but who has a son even wilier than himself. Another rascal is so clever that we may forgive him his evil deeds; he is to suffer after death an age in hell by reason of his misdeeds, but a single gift to a pious person entitles him to one day’s life as Indra. Of this he takes opportunity to gather all his friends and to traverse with them the sacred places of India, thus acquiring such merit as to remain Indra. But yet this god also is lightly treated; still more often are religious ascetics denounced; one of them who in order to get into his possession a pretty girl frightens her father into exposing her in a chest Danaë-like, finds the wrong chest, and has his nose and ears bitten off by an ape, while the girl is rescued by a prince.