A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s5.193

v2.c19.s5.193

Narrative works, too, have been written in Pāli down to the most recent times. The most important of these works is the Rasavāhinī,⁴ a collection of 103 narratives, of which the first 40 are set in India and the remaining 63 in Ceylon. The work was originally written in the Singhalese language, was later translated into Pāli by a monk Raṭṭhapāla, and still later (in the 13th century) corrected by the Thera Vedeha.⁵ In spite of this “correction,” it is still written in bad Pāli, and in an extremely careless style. The Rasavāhinī is really a collection of sermons in the guise of edifying legends told in the favourite mixture of prose and verse. Each tale or sermon ends with an exhortation, *e.g.*, “O friends, never tire of doing good;” or, “Even a cruel tiger, feeding on the flesh of others, was wise, and he was admitted into heaven by reason of his compassion. Therefore be ever merciful towards men; for this will bring you blessings and happiness in the forms of existence.” (II, 5). The Buddha-worship in some of the legends differs in no way from that of the Mahāyāna, nor from the Viṣṇu-Bhakti of the Bhāgavatas, *e.g.*, in the story of the snake that is tamed by the one word “Buddha.” Side by side with many somewhat naïve legends, there are also in the collection a good number of stories of great merit, some of which are also interesting on account of their parallels in universal literature. Thus, here again, we find the universally known story of the grateful animals and the ungrateful human being, with which we already met in the Jātaka. Some of the stories are borrowed from earlier works, such as Buddhaghosa’s commentaries, or the Mahāvaṃsa.