A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s4: 4. Other Cases of Contact between East and West

A History of Sanskrit Literature c24.s4

Language: English

4. Other Cases of Contact between East and West

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Tales which cannot be traced thus definitely to Indian sources may yet readily be assumed to have reached the west from India in view of these proved facts. Nor is it difficult to imagine modes of transmission³; apart from literature, tales pass easily enough from mouth to mouth, and the Crusades resulted in prolonged intercourse between Christians and Mahomedans. Then the Arab rule in Spain served to mediate between the civilizations of west and east, and the Jews in their turn played an important part as intermediaries. The influence on the Mongols in this regard has been exaggerated by Benfey, but doubtless under-estimated by Cosquin.¹ There is no reason to doubt that the Gipsies² helped to spread tales, as their Indian origin is well established. Byzantine literature,³ again, must have been a factor in the literary diffusion of stories. But it would be absurd to assume that the borrowing was all from one side, as Benfey was inclined to do as regards fairy tales. Cosquin has, indeed, done much to defend this thesis by his efforts to prove that the better-motived tales are often Indian; Lang, with various qualifications, and Bédier have insisted instead on the independent generation of tales in different places, while Antti Aarne has endeavoured to work on the basis that every country may produce tales, but these tales wander far and wide, so that the end of research is to establish *motifs* which belong to one country or another; thus a group of ideas centring in a magic ring is Indian in origin, another dealing with three magic substances is British and French, another centring in a magic bird is Persian. In most cases it may be frankly admitted that it is extremely difficult to achieve any satisfactory result.

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³ For the period to A. D. 600 see Kennedy, JRAS. 1917, pp. 226 ff.

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¹ Cosquin, *Études folkloriques*, pp. 497 ff.

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² Wlislocki, ZDMG. xli. 448 ff.; xlii. 113 ff.

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³ E. Kuhn, *Byzant. Zeitschrift*, iv. 241.

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A certain degree of assurance may be felt regarding the familiar tale of Sinbad. The Arabian historian Masūdi, who died in 956, expressly ascribes to the *Kitāb el Sindbād* an Indian origin; this work corresponds to the Persian *Sindibādnāmeh*, the Syriac *Sindban*, the Arabic ‘Seven Viziers’ which is found in manuscripts of the *Arabian Nights*, the Hebrew *Sandabar*, the Greek *Syntipas*,⁴ and a mass of European tales. The plan of the work is taken from the *Pañcatantra*; a king entrusts his son to a wise man who undertakes to teach him wisdom in six months; the Indian *motif* of telling tales to save the life of some one, here a prince condemned to death, is found, and the stories have usually Indian parallels; that of the ichneumon is taken from the *Pañcatantra*, and the others are often specimens of women’s tricks to cover their infidelities, which are common in India, forming as it were a supplement of the *Pañcatantra*. The Greek *Syntipas* contains various passages which can only be read successfully by recognizing that they are merely corruptions of a Sanskrit original, and everything supports the conclusion that we have here another case of an Arabic original rendered from a Pahlavi translation of a Sanskrit text.

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⁴ H. Warren, *Het indische origineel van den Griekschen Syntipas*; Hertel, ZDMG. lxxiv. 458 ff.

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It is natural to extend the doctrine and to find the original of the Arabian *Thousand and One Nights* in India,¹ and something substantial has been done in this direction by proving that the prologue and setting of the tales are a contamination of *motifs* which are quite well known in India. Thus we have the Jain legend of Kanakamañjarī, who retains for six months the undivided love of the king by the device of beginning a tale each night but not finishing it. Again, we have in a Chinese rendering of a Buddhist tale (A.D. 251), in the *Kathāsaritsāgara*, and in Hemacandra, variations of the theme of the man who is utterly depressed by finding out that his wife is unfaithful, but recovers happiness because he discovers that the king himself is equally being made a mock of. The further adventure of Shahriar and Shahzeman has a parallel in the *Kathāsaritsāgara*. There are other traces of Indian influence in the tales, and it is clear that it is impossible to ascribe them to borrowing from Persia; translations from Persian into Sanskrit are normally late, as in Çrīvara’s *Kathākautuka*² written on the theme of Yusuf and Zuleikha under Zainu-l-‘Abidīn in the fifteenth century. The only matter that can be in doubt is the extent of the influence; certainly there is nothing in this case to prove the taking over of a whole cycle of stories from an Indian work, now lost.

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¹ Cosquin, *op. cit.*, pp. 265 ff.; Przyluski, JA. ccv. 101 ff., who finds in the Svayaṁvara of India a relic of the Austroasiatic festival dance at which young people were mated. Cf. Macdonald, JRAS. 1924, pp. 353 ff.

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² Ed. and trans. R. Schmidt (Kiel, 1898).

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In Europe, apart from the translations enumerated, traces of real Indian origin are hard to prove.³ A Carolingian poem of the ninth century tells how a hunter slew a boar, was himself killed by and caused the death of a snake, which is a feeble tale in comparison with the Indian story of the greedy jackal who was lucky enough to find a hunter who had killed a deer, and had also slain a boar which killed him, but meets death through eating first out of the spirit of thrift the bowstring. Peter Alfonsi (twelfth century) knows a tale which occurred in Barzōe's introduction to his version of the *Pañcatantra* and some other Indian narratives, but merely as handed down in Arabic. Walter Mapes' knowledge is doubtful, but Marie of France has clear parallels, and the bird of St. Martin recounted by Odo of Sheriton (*c.* 1215), which held up its limbs to keep up the sky but appealed in terror to the saint when a leaf fell on it, can be traced to the *Mahābhārata* and the *Pañcatantra*. Nigel of Canterbury's knowledge (*c.* 1180) of the tale of the ingratitude of man as contrasted with that of animals is not necessarily borrowed, nor is the *motif* of the fatal letter and its bearer in Saxo Grammaticus probably Indian, seeing that we have already the conception in Homer. James of Vitry, bishop of Ptolemais, a Crusader, in his *Exempla* tells from hearsay the stories of the Brahmin who was cheated by rogues, of the Brahmin who built castles in the air, and of the son who was going to bury his too long-lived grandfather, while his own son prepared a grave for him. In the *de diversis rebus praedicabilibus* of the Dominican Étienne of Bourbon, who died *c.* 1260, we find a version of the story of the blind and the lame, well known in Jain texts,¹ and a variant of the judgement of Solomon² in which two women dispute over a ball of wool and the issue is decided by asking what was the kernel used on which to wind the material³; the Indian tale, found in a Chinese version, in Buddhaghosa, and the *Çukasaptati*,⁴ of his stepfather's device of ridding himself of the Bodhisattva appears in Étienne as the tale of the page whose prince, suspecting him of an intrigue, sends him to the workers at his oven who have instructions to fling into it the first who comes with a royal message. Étienne also tells us of the innocent hound, transmuted into St. Guinefort and an object of worship, whose tomb he insisted on destroying. The *Gesta Romanorum* contains various stories which may be of Indian origin; one in a manuscript of 1469¹ is so elaborate as to leave no doubt of its origin, for it tells of how a knight who was taught in gratitude the language of the beasts managed to escape revealing it to his wife, a famous Jātaka tale. On the other hand it is impossible to ignore independent development; if Heinrich Seuse (*c.* 1330) illustrates the idea of eternity by telling of a bird which once in 100,000 years picks up a grain of corn from a millstone of the size of the earth (the period until the stone shall be made bare is but a moment in comparison with eternity), it is far-fetched to claim derivation from the Indian conception of a world age as longer than the period taken by a man who once in a hundred years rubs a mountain with a silk cloth to level it with the ground.

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³ Günter, *Buddha*, pp. 99 ff. The famous tale of the poison maiden in Indian literature and in the west—told of Aristotle and Alexander in the *Secretum Secretorum* (cf. Hawthorne, *Rappaccini’s Daughter*), is discussed by Penzer, *Ocean of Story*, ii. 311 ff.

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¹ Hertel, *Geist des Ostens*, i. 248 ff.

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² Cf. Hertel, *loc. cit.*, 189 ff. on the issue of the ultimate original of the Indian versions of 1 Kings, iii. 16; *Jātaka*, 546.

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³ Zachariae, *Kl. Schriften*, pp. 84 ff.

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⁴ Cf. the legend of St. Elizabeth of Portugal, Cosquin, *Études folkloriques*, pp. 73 ff., who (p. 160) insists on the exchange of persons or messages as distinguishing these tales from such cases as Bellerophon.

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¹ Günter, *Buddha*, pp. 122 ff.

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From the late middle ages comes evidence of the borrowing of several stories of cleverness, as in the story of the man who finds out guilty servants by more or less accidental observations made at table.² The seven-league boots of fairy tale are found in the *Kathāsaritsāgara* and may be Indian, but many other *motifs* are hardly to be assigned to one nation; thus we have the hero who is vulnerable in one spot only much earlier in Greece than in India and independently probably in Germany; the tree which yields what it is asked for depends on the widespread belief in tree spirits; the man or animal which yields gold attests, though early in India, to community of ideas rather than borrowing; the burning of a skin which frees the enchanted prince seems ethnic. Various peoples know of flying birds which carry heroes on long journeys. Circe in the *Odyssey* need not be the source of the Yakṣiṇī of the tale of Niçcayadatta in the *Kathāsaritsāgara*.³

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² Cf. Forke, *Die indischen Märchen*, pp. 36 f.; Zachariae, *op. cit.*, pp. 138 ff.

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³ See Tawney's trans., i. 337 ff.; cf. the Sirenes of *Od.*, xii. 39 ff. and Jātakas 41, 96, 196, 439; *Mahāvaṅsa* (Geiger, p. 25).

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Of interesting *motifs* due to India Cosquin⁴ offers a good example in the *Mahosadha Jātaka* tale of how a faithful wife served gallants who sought to seduce her in her husband's absence, ending up with conveying them in jars before the king, an episode which is proved ancient by a relief at Bharhut on which is depicted the opening of three coffers in each of which is a prisoner. The story is preserved in perhaps a more original fashion in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā* legend of Upakoçā, who induces the gallants to take a bath and has them blackened by a sticky preparation, in which condition they are revealed to the king. It seems difficult to doubt that this is the source of the inferior version in the fable of Constant du Hamel and Isabeau in the thirteenth century. A variant of the same idea appears in the story of Devasmitā in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā*, and it is probable enough that we must seek an Indian original for the form of the legend as it appears in the *Gesta Romanorum* (*c.* 1300), in the romance of Perceforest, and in the fifteenth-century English poem, *The Wright's Chaste Wife*. It is tempting no doubt to find¹ in the common idea of the ogre and the fascinating daughter who helped the lover to deceive her father, who despite his wickedness is stupid, the result of the Indian idea preserved in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā* of the youth who is aided by the daughter of a Rākṣasa whose stupidness she asserts is due to his origin, to win her hand by accomplishing all the impossible feats set to him. But proof is wanting. Another tale,² which has a fair chance of being Indian in origin, is the type of the boiling cauldron and the pretended lack of skill as in the case of Vikramāditya, who is saved by the warning given by a skull from the ruse of a Yogin who bids him turn round a cauldron into which he means to fling him; the king asks to be shown how to act and slays the miscreant by his own device. The tale³ of the cat who held a candle for the king but at last lets it go at the sight of a third mouse, though he has permitted two to pass unnoticed, may be of Indian origin, but that is clearly not proved; it is, however, probable that the idea of the vigil of Solomon and Marcolphus, well known in the fourteenth century, is due to India, where the tale of Rohaka⁴ and the king of Ujjain is known in the twelfth century and that of Pradyota and a Gandhāran is found in the Kanjur, in the ninth century. Nor is the idea of the magician and his apprentice¹ who assumes all sorts of forms to emerge from different impasses unique; the legend of Mestra in Ovid² shows that tales of this sort could easily arise in independence of India, where indeed the *motif* is not specially important.

Cites (9)

Kathāsaritsāgara — Somadeva Bhaṭṭa, Sanskrit
Jātaka — Pāli
Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
Śukasaptati — Sanskrit
Mahāvaṃsa — Pāli
Bṛhatkathā
Bharhut
Kathākautuka — Śrīvara, Sanskrit
Pañcatantra (Durgasiṃha) — Durgasiṃha (Kannada), Kannada