INTRODUCTION.

In an Appendix to his “Buddhism in Tibet,” Dr. Emil Schlagintweit has

given “An alphabetical list of the books and memoirs connected with

Buddhism.” Although not completely exhaustive, it occupies thirty-five

pages, and contains references to more than a hundred separate works,

and a much larger number of essays and other literary articles. Of

those books and articles, the titles of about sixty allude to Tibet. To

them may be referred readers who wish for detailed information about

that country, its literature, and its religion. All that it is

proposed to do here is to say a few words about the Tibetan work from

which have been extracted the tales contained in the present volume; to

give a short account of the enthusiastic Hungarian scholar, Csoma

Körösi, who had so much to do with making that work known to Europe;

and to call attention to any features which the stories now before us

may have in common with European folk-tales. To do more, without merely

repeating what has been already said, would require a rare amount of

special knowledge; and it may safely be asserted that remarks about

Buddhism, made by writers who do not possess such knowledge, are seldom

of signal value.

The tales contained in the sacred books of Tibet, it may be as well to

remark at the outset, appear to have little that is specially Tibetan

about them except their language. Stories possessing characteristic

features and suffused with local colour may possibly live in the

memories of the natives of that region of lofty and bleak table-lands,

with which so few Europeans have had an opportunity of becoming

familiar. But the legends and fables which the late Professor Schiefner

has translated from the Kah-gyur are merely Tibetan versions of

Sanskrit writings. No mention is made in them of those peculiarities of

Tibetan Buddhism which have most struck the fancy of foreign observers.

They never allude to the rosary of 108 beads which every Tibetan

carries, “that he may keep a reckoning of his good words, which supply

to him the place of good deeds;” the praying wheels, “those curious

machines which, filled with prayers, or charms, or passages from holy

books, stand in the towns in every open place, are placed beside the

footpaths and the roads, revolve in every stream, and even (by the help

of sails like those of windmills) are turned by every breeze which

blows o’er the thrice-sacred valleys of Tibet;” the “Trees of the Law,”

the lofty flagstaffs from which flutter banners emblazoned with the

sacred words, “Ah! the jewel is in the lotus,” the turning of which

towards heaven by the wind counts as the utterance of a prayer capable

of bringing down blessings upon the whole country-side; or of that

Lamaism which “bears outwardly, at least, a strong resemblance to

Romanism, in spite of the essential difference of its teachings and of

its mode of thought.” [1] There is, therefore, no present need to dwell

at length upon the land into which the legends and doctrines were

transplanted which had previously flourished on Indian soil, or the

people by whom they have been religiously preserved, but whose actions

and thoughts they do not by any means fully represent. “At the present

day,” says Mr. Rhys Davids, “the Buddhism of Nepāl and Tibet differs

from the Buddhism of Ceylon as much as the Christianity of Rome or of

Moscow differs from that of Scotland or Wales. But,” he proceeds to

say, “the history of Buddhism from its commencement to its close is an

epitome of the religious history of mankind. And we have not solved the

problem of Buddhism when we have understood the faith of the early

Buddhists. It is in this respect that the study of later Buddhism in

Ceylon, Burma, and Siam, in Nepāl and in Tibet, in China, Mongolia, and

Japan, is only second in importance to the study of early Buddhism.”

[2]

With regard to the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, Emil

Schlagintweit [3] remarks that “the early history is involved in

darkness and myth.” Sanang Setsen, in his “History of the East

Mongols,” [4] says that during the reign of King Hlatotori, who came to

the throne in 367 A.D., four objects descended from heaven one day and

lighted upon the golden terrace of his palace, “namely, the image of

two hands in the position of prayer, a golden pyramid-temple an ell

high, a small coffer with a gem marked with the six fundamental

syllables (Om-ma-ni-pad-mè-hûm), and the manual called Szamadok.” [5]

As the king did not understand the nature of the holy objects, he

ordered them to be locked up in his treasury. While they lay there,

“misfortune came upon the king. If children were born, they came into

the world blind; fruits and grain came to nothing; cattle plague,

famine, and pestilence prevailed; and of unavoidable misery was there

much.” But after forty years had passed, there came five strangers to

the king and said, “Great king, how couldst thou let these objects, so

mystic and powerful, be cast into the treasury?” Having thus spoken,

they suddenly disappeared. Therefore the king ordered the holy objects

to be brought forth from the treasury, and to be attached to the points

of standards, and treated with the utmost respect and reverence. After

that all went well: the king became prosperous and long-lived, children

were born beautiful, famine and pestilence came to an end, and in their

place appeared happiness and welfare. With the date of this event

Sanang Setsen connects the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet; but

according to Tibetan historians, says Schlagintweit, “the earliest

period of the propagation of Buddhism, which reached down till the end

of the tenth century A.D., begins with King Srongtsan Gampo, who was

born in the year 617 A.D., and died 698.” This king is said to have

sent a mission to India in the year 632 A.D., the result of which was

the invention of a Tibetan alphabet, based upon Devanāgari characters,

and the translation into Tibetan of Indian sacred books. In his

introduction of Buddhism into his kingdom he is said to have been “most

energetically supported by his two wives, one of whom was a Nepalese,

the other a Chinese princess. Both of them, who throughout their

lifetime proved most faithful votaries to the faith of Buddha, are

worshipped either under the general name of Dolma (in Sanskrit Tārā),

or under the respective names of Dolkar and Doljang.” After making

considerable progress during the reign of this monarch, the new

religion lost ground under his immediate successors. “But under one of

them, Thisrong de tsan, ... Buddhism began to revive, owing to the

useful regulations proclaimed by this king. He it was who successfully

crushed an attempt made by the chiefs during his minority to suppress

the new creed, and it is principally due to him that the Buddhist faith

became henceforth permanently established.”

Towards the end of the ninth century, continues Schlagintweit, Buddhism

was strongly opposed by a ruler who “commanded all temples and

monasteries to be demolished, the images to be destroyed, and the

sacred books to be burnt;” and his son and successor is also said to

have died “without religion;” but his grandson was favourably inclined

towards Buddhism, and rebuilt eight temples. “With this period we have

to connect ‘the second propagation of Buddhism;’ it received,

especially from the year 971 A.D., a powerful impetus from the joint

endeavours of the returned Tibetan priests (who had fled the country

under the preceding kings), and of the learned Indian priest Pandita

Atisha and his pupil Brom-ston. Shortly before Atisha came to Tibet,

1041 A.D., the Kāla Chakra doctrine, or Tantrika mysticism, was

introduced into Tibet, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries many

Indian refugees settled in the country, who greatly assisted the

Tibetans in the translation of Sanskrit books.” It is probably from

this period that the Kah-gyur dates.

In the fourteenth century arose the reformer Tsonkhapa, who “imposed

upon himself the difficult task of uniting and reconciling the

dialectical and mystical schools which Tibetan Buddhism had brought

forth, and also of eradicating the abuses gradually introduced by the

priests.” Tradition asserts that he “had some intercourse with a

stranger from the West, who was remarkable for a long nose. Huc

believes this stranger to have been a European missionary, and connects

the resemblance of the religious service in Tibet to the Roman Catholic

ritual with the information which Tsonkhapa might have received from

this Roman Catholic priest. We are not yet able to decide the question

as to how far Buddhism may have borrowed from Christianity; but the

rites of the Buddhists enumerated by the French missionary can for the

most part either be traced back to institutions peculiar to Buddhism,

or they have sprung up in periods posterior to Tsonkhapa.” [6]

Mr. Rhys Davids has remarked that, “As in India, after the expulsion of

Buddhism, the degrading worship of Śiva and his dusky bride had been

incorporated into Brahmanism from the wild and savage devil-worship of

the dark non-Aryan tribes, so as pure Buddhism died away in the North,

the Tantra system, a mixture of magic and witchcraft and Śiva-worship,

was incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism.” [7] Of this change for

the worse, evidence about which there can be no mistake is supplied by

the Tibetan sacred books. Dr. Malan, who has made himself acquainted

with the contents of some of their volumes in the original, says, [8]

“There are passages of great beauty and great good sense, the most

abstruse metaphysics, and the most absurd and incredible stories; yet

not worse than those told in the Talmud, which equal or even surpass

them in absurdity.”

On New Year’s day 1820, a traveller started from Bucharest on an

adventurous journey towards the East. His name was Alexander Csoma

Körösi (or de Körös), [9] and he was one of the sons of a Szekler

military family of Eger-patak, in the Transylvanian circle of Hungary.

In 1799, when he seems to have been about nine years old, [10] he was

sent to the Protestant College at Nagy-Enyed, where he studied for many

years with the idea of taking orders. In 1815 he was sent to Germany,

and there he studied for three years, chiefly at the University of

Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of the celebrated Orientalist

Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. After his return from Germany, he spent the

greater part of the year 1819 in studying various Slavonic dialects,

first at Temesvar in Lower Hungary, then at Agram in Croatia. But he

soon resolved to apply himself to less-known tongues.

“Among other liberal pursuits,” he wrote in 1825, [11] “my favourite

studies were philology, geography, and history. Although my

ecclesiastical studies had prepared me for an honourable employment in

my native country, yet my inclination for the studies above-mentioned

induced me to seek a wider field for their future cultivation. As my

parents were dead, and my only brother did not want my assistance, I

resolved to leave my native country and to come towards the East, and,

by some means or other procuring subsistence, to devote my whole life

to researches which may be afterwards useful in general to the learned

world of Europe, and in particular may illustrate some obscure facts in

ancient history.” Having no hope, he says, of obtaining “an imperial

passport” for his journey, he procured “a printed Hungarian passport at

Nagy-Enyed, to come on some pretended business to Bucharest,” intending

to study Turkish there and then to go on to Constantinople. But he

could obtain neither instruction in Turkish nor the means of going

direct to Constantinople. So he set forth from Bucharest on the 1st of

January 1820, and travelled with some Bulgarian companions to

Philippopolis. Tidings of plague forced him to turn aside to the coast

of the Archipelago, whence he sailed in a Greek ship to Alexandria.

Driven from that city by the plague, he made his way by sea to the

coast of Syria, and thence on foot to Aleppo. From that city he

proceeded to Bagdad, which he reached in July, travelling part of the

way on foot, “with different caravans from various places, in an

Asiatic dress,” and the rest “by water on a raft.” In September he left

Bagdad, travelling in European costume on horseback with a caravan, and

in the middle of next month he arrived at Teheran. In the capital of

Persia he spent four months. In March 1821 he again started with a

caravan, travelling as an Armenian, and, after a stay of six months in

Khorasán, arrived in the middle of November at Bokhara. There he

intended to pass the winter; but at the end of five days, “affrighted

by frequent exaggerated reports of the approach of a numerous Russian

army,” he travelled with a caravan to Kabul, where he arrived early in

January 1822. At the end of a fortnight he again set out with a

caravan. Making acquaintance on the way with Runjeet Sing’s French

officers, Generals Allard and Ventura, he accompanied them to Lahore.

By their aid he obtained permission to enter Kashmir, with the

intention of proceeding to Yarkand; but finding that the road was “very

difficult, expensive, and dangerous for a Christian,” he set out from

Leh in Ladak, the farthest point he reached, to return to Lahore. On

his way back, near the Kashmir frontier, he met Mr. Moorcroft and

returned with him to Leh. There Mr. Moorcroft lent him the “Alphabetum

Tibetanum,” the ponderous work published at Rome in 1762, compiled by

Father Antonio Agostino Giorgi out of the materials sent from Tibet by

the Capuchin Friars. Its perusal induced him to stay for some time at

Leh in order to study Tibetan, profiting by “the conversation and

instruction of an intelligent person, who was well acquainted with the

Tibetan and Persian languages.” During the winter, which he spent at

Kashmir, he became so interested in Tibetan that he determined to

devote himself to its study, so as to be able to “penetrate into those

numerous and highly interesting volumes which are to be found in every

large monastery.” He communicated his ideas to Mr. Moorcroft, who fully

approved of his plan, and provided him with money and official

recommendations. Starting afresh from Kashmir in May 1823, he reached

Leh in the beginning of June. From that city, he says, “travelling in a

south-westerly direction, I arrived on the ninth day at Yangla, and

from the 20th of June 1823 to the 22d of October 1824 I sojourned in

Zanskár (the most south-western province of Ladákh), where I applied

myself to the Tibetan literature, assisted by the Lámá.”

With the approach of winter he left Zanskár, and towards the end of

November 1824 arrived at Sabathú. In the letter which he wrote during

his stay there, in January 1825, he says, “At my first entrance to the

British Indian territory, I was fully persuaded I should be received as

a friend by the Government.” Nor was he disappointed. As at Bagdad and

Teheran, so in India was the Hungarian pilgrim welcomed and assisted by

the British authorities. In 1826 he seems (says Dr. Archibald Campbell

[12]) to have paid a second visit to Western Tibet, and to have

continued “to study in the monasteries of that country, living in the

poorest possible manner,” till 1831. In the autumn of that year Dr.

Campbell met him at Simla, “dressed in a coarse blue cloth loose gown,

extending to his heels, and a small cloth cap of the same material. He

wore a grizzly beard, shunned the society of Europeans, and passed his

whole time in study.” It is much to be regretted that he has left no

record of his residence in the monasteries in which he passed so long a

time, in one of which, “with the thermometer below zero for more than

four months, he was precluded by the severity of the weather from

stirring out of a room nine feet square. Yet in this situation he read

from morning till evening without a fire, the ground forming his bed,

and the walls of the building his protection against the rigours of the

climate, and still he collected and arranged forty thousand words in

the language of Tibet, and nearly completed his Dictionary and

Grammar.” [13] Day after day, says M. Pavie, [14] he would sit in a

wretched hut at the door of a monastery, reading aloud Buddhistic works

with a Lama by his side. When a page was finished, the two readers

would nudge each other’s elbows. The question was which of them was to

turn over the leaf, thereby exposing his hand for the moment,

unprotected by the long-furred sleeve, to the risk of being

frost-bitten.

In May 1832 he went to Calcutta, where he met with great kindness from

many scholars, especially Professor H. H. Wilson and Mr. James Prinsep,

and, after a time, he was appointed assistant-librarian to the Asiatic

Society of Bengal. At Calcutta he spent many years, and there his two

principal works, the “Essay Towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English,”

[15] and the “Grammar of the Tibetan Language,” were brought out at the

expense of Government in 1834. “In the beginning of 1836,” says Dr.

Campbell, “his anxiety to visit Lassa induced him to leave Calcutta for

Titalya, in the hope of accomplishing his design through Bootan, Sikim,

or Nipal.” Of his life in Titalya, where he seems to have spent more

than a year, some account is given by Colonel G. W. A. Lloyd, who says,

“He would not remain in my house, as he thought his eating and living

with me would cause him to be deprived of the familiarity and society

of the natives, with whom it was his wish to be colloquially intimate,

and I therefore got him a common native hut, and made it as comfortable

as I could for him, but still he seemed to me to be miserably off. I

also got him a servant, to whom he paid three or four rupees a month,

and his living did not cost him more than four more.”

Towards the end of 1837 [16] he returned to Calcutta. I have been

favoured by a very accomplished linguist, the Rev. S. C. Malan, D.D.,

Rector of Broadwindsor, Dorset, who was at one time secretary to the

Asiatic Society of Bengal, with an account of his acquaintance with

Csoma Körösi during the Hungarian scholar’s second residence at

Calcutta. Dr. Malan writes as follows:—

“As regards Csoma de Körös, I never think of him without interest and

gratitude. I had heard of him, and seen his Tibetan Grammar and

Dictionary before leaving England. And one thing that used to make me

think a five months’ voyage interminable was my longing to become

acquainted with one who had prepared the way for the acquisition of a

language of Asia, thought until then almost mythical. For neither

Father Georgi’s nor Abel Rémusat’s treatises went very far to clear the

mystery.

“One of my early visits, then, was to the Asiatic Society’s house [in

Calcutta], where Csoma lived as under-librarian. [17] I found him a man

of middle stature, of somewhat strange expression and features, much

weather-beaten from his travels, but kind, amiable, and willing to

impart all he knew. He was, however, very shy, and extremely

disinterested. Although I had to cross the river to come to him, I

requested him at once to give me one lesson a week in Tibetan, and he

agreed to do so most readily. But I could not make him consent to take

any money. He told me to come as often as I liked, on the condition

that his teaching was to be free, for the pleasure and love of it. Of

course this prevented me from visiting him as frequently as I should

otherwise have done, yet I went to him for a lesson as often as I dared

to do so. Although I frequently asked him to come and stay in my house

for change of air, I never could prevail upon him to come, owing to his

shyness and retiring habits. But as I happened to be the only person

who was troubling himself about Tibetan, he and I became very good

friends during the whole of my (alas! too short) stay in India. And

when we parted he gave me the whole of his Tibetan books, some thirty

volumes. I value such relics highly, and still use the same volume,

containing his Grammar and Dictionary, which I used to turn over with

him.”

Speaking of Csoma Körösi’s literary life at Calcutta, M. Pavie says, in

the article which has already been cited, “These labours occupied his

time for the space of nine years. He had turned his study into a sort

of cell, from which he scarcely ever emerged, except to walk up and

down the long neighbouring galleries. It was there that, during our

stay in Bengal, we very frequently saw him, absorbed in a dreamy

meditation, smiling at his own thoughts, as silent as the Brahmans who

were copying Sanskrit texts. He had forgotten Europe to live amid the

clouds of ancient Asia.”

Early in 1842 Csoma Körösi left Calcutta, with the intention of

revisiting Tibet, and of making his way, if possible, to Lhasa, where

he was in hopes of discovering rich stores of Tibetan literature as yet

unknown to the learned world. On the 24th of March he arrived at

Darjíling, in Nepal, where the superintendent of the station, Dr.

Archibald Campbell, did all he could to further his views. But on the

6th of April he was attacked by fever, and on the 11th he died, a

victim, as Professor Max Müller has said, “to his heroic devotion to

the study of ancient languages and religions.” His wants, apart from

literary requirements, appear to have been as few as those of any monk,

whether Christian or Buddhistic. “His effects,” says Dr. Campbell,

“consisted of four boxes of books and papers, the suit of blue clothes

which he always wore, and in which he died, a few shirts, and one

cooking-pot. His food was confined to tea, of which he was very fond,

and plain boiled rice, of which he ate very little. On a mat on the

floor, with a box of books on the four sides, he sat, ate, slept, and

studied; never undressed at night, and rarely went out during the day.

He never drank wine or spirits, or used tobacco or other stimulants.”

A few days before he died he gave Dr. Campbell “a rapid summary of the

manner in which he believed his native land was possessed by the

original ‘Huns,’ and his reasons for tracing them to Central or Eastern

Asia.” Dr. Campbell gathered from his conversation that “all his hopes

of attaining the object of the long and laborious search were centred

in the discovery of the country of the ‘Yoogars.’ This land he believed

to be to the east and north of Lassa and the province of Kham, and on

the northern confines of China; to reach it was the goal of his most

ardent wishes, and there he fully expected to find the tribes he had

hitherto sought in vain.” On the way he hoped to make great literary

discoveries, and he would dilate in the most enthusiastic manner “on

the delight he expected to derive from coming in contact with some of

the learned men of the East (Lassa), as the Lamas of Ladakh and Kānsun,

with whom alone he had previous communion, were confessedly inferior in

learning to those of Eastern Tibet.” He was generally reticent about

the benefits which scholars might derive from his contemplated journey,

but “What would Hodgson, Turnour, and some of the philosophers of

Europe not give to be in my place when I get to Lassa!” was a frequent

exclamation of his during his conversations with Dr. Campbell before

his illness.

The Asiatic Society of Bengal at once placed a thousand rupees at the

disposal of Dr. Campbell for the erection of a monument above the

remains of the Hungarian pilgrim. And the Government of India has since

given instructions that the grave of this genuine and disinterested

scholar shall be for all time placed under the care of the British

Resident at Darjíling. [18]

To the Hungarian enthusiast may be fairly applied, with a slight

change, the words which Professor Max Müller [19] has written with

reference to Hiouen-thsang, the Chinese pilgrim, who spent so much time

“quietly pursuing among strangers, within the bleak walls of the cell

of a Buddhist college, the study of a foreign language,” that there was

“something in his life and the work of his life that places him by

right among the heroes of Greece, the martyrs of Rome, the knights of

the Crusades, the explorers of the Arctic regions; something that makes

it a duty to inscribe his name on the roll of the worthies of the human

race.”

Although the language and literature of Tibet occupied so much of Csoma

Körösi’s time and thoughts, yet the main object of his life was to work

out the mysterious problem as to the origin of the Hungarian nation.

According to M. Jules Mohl, it was a remark of Blumenbach’s about the

possibility of discovering in Asia the original home of the prehistoric

ancestors of the Magyars, which first turned the attention to the

subject of the young Hungarian, who was then studying medicine at

Göttingen. According to Hunfalvy, [20] his fancy may have been fired by

De Guignes’s opinion, published a little before 1815, that the Huns had

wandered from the western borders of the Chinese empire, first to the

neighbourhood of the Volga, and then on to Pannonia. But the fact of

Csoma Körösi being a Szekler by birth, says Hunfalvy, is regarded as

one of the reasons for his looking for the origin of his nation and

language in the seat of the ancient Huns. For the Hungarian chronicles

had for centuries nourished in the Szeklers the belief that they were

the direct descendants of the Huns of Attila. In a letter which he

wrote home during his stay in Teheran, dated the 21st of December 1820,

he said:—“Both to satisfy my own desire, and to prove my gratitude and

love to my nation, I have set off, and must search for the origin of my

nation according to the lights which I have kindled in Germany,

avoiding neither dangers that may perhaps occur, nor the distance I may

have to travel. Heaven has favoured my course, and if some great

misfortune does not happen to me, I shall within a short time be able

to prove that my conviction was founded upon no false basis.” During

his stay in Calcutta, between his expeditions, he experienced “the

bitterest moments of his life,” being conscious that up to that time he

had fruitlessly looked for the origin of the Hungarians. It was that

feeling, says Hunfalvy, which drove him forth upon the pilgrimage which

proved fatal to him. “According to his conviction, the country

inhabited by the Dsugur or Dzungar race, dwelling to the north-east of

Lhassa, on the western frontier of China, was the goal which he had

been seeking all his life, the region in which he might hope at length

to discover the Asiatic descendants of the ancestors of his Hungarian

forefathers.” The foundation of his hopes, as expressed a few days

before his death to Dr. Campbell, was as follows:—“In the dialects of

Europe, the Sclavonic, Celtic, Saxon, and German, I believe, the people

who gave their name to the country now called Hungary were styled

Hunger or Ungur, Oongar or Yoongar; and in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian

works there are notices of a nation in Central Asia resembling in many

respects the people who came from the East into Hungary. In these

languages they are styled Oogur, Woogur, Voogur, or Yoogur, according

to the pronunciation of the Persian letters; and from the same works it

might be inferred, he said, that the country of the Yoogurs was

situated as above noted.” His views, however, on this subject are not

accepted by his countrymen. His opinion “was based upon a false

foundation,” says Hunfalvy, and consequently his labours in that

particular field have remained without result. But as a scholar in

general, as a specialist in everything which concerns Tibet, and as a

single-minded, self-sacrificing student, he is held in high honour in

his native land, as may be learnt from the oration which was delivered

in his honour at Pest on the 8th of October 1843 by Baron Joseph

Eötvos, who was at one time the Minister of Public Instruction for

Hungary.

On this subject I have been favoured with a letter (in English) from

the Hungarian linguist and explorer Professor Arminius Vámbéry. In it,

after stating that scarcely anything is known in Hungary about the

early years of Csoma Körösi, he proceeds to say:—“We only know that it

was the study of Oriental languages in Germany which gave him the idea

of the possibility of finding a people in Asia speaking our language,

and closely connected with us. This, of course, was a mistake, for

Hungarian, a mixed tongue consisting of an Ugrian and a Turko-Tatar

dialect, has undergone two genetic periods—one in the ancient seat

between the Urals and the Volga, and another after the settlement on

Pannonia, where also large Slavonic elements inserted themselves. It

was thus a sheer impossibility to discover in Asia a language similar

to ours, although a considerable amount of affinity can be proved,

partly in the Ugrian branch (the Ostyak and the Vogul), partly in the

Eastern Turkish, unadulterated by Persian and Arab influence.

“This knowledge, however, is the result of recent investigations, and

poor Körösi could have had hardly any notion of it. His unbounded love

for science and for his nation drove him to the East without a penny in

his pocket, and most curious is the account I heard from an old

Hungarian, Count Teleky, regarding the outset of Körösi’s travels. The

Count was standing before the gate of his house in a village in

Transylvania, when he saw Körösi passing by, clad in a thin yellow

nankin dress, with a stick in his hand and a small bundle.

“‘Where are you going, M. Körösi?’ asked the Count.

“‘I am going to Asia in search of our relatives,’ was the answer.

“And thus he really went ... undergoing, as may easily be conceived,

all the hardships and privations of a traveller destitute of means,

living upon alms, and exposed, besides, to the bitter deception of not

having found the looked-for relatives. And still he went on in his

unflagging zeal, until, assisted by your noble countrymen, he was able

to raise himself a memorial by his Tibetan studies.

“I suppose that, when dying in Ladak ... he always had his eyes

directed to the steppes north of Tibet, to the Tangus country, where,

of course, he would have again been disillusioned.

“Körösi was therefore a victim to unripe philological speculation, like

many other Hungarian scholars unknown to the world. But his name will

be always a glory to our nation, and I am really glad to hear that

[some one] ... has devoted time to refresh the memory of that great

man.—Yours very sincerely,

“A. Vámbéry.

“Budapest, February 20, 1882.”

About the time when Csoma Körösi was starting from Bucharest on his

adventurous pilgrimage, another equally genuine and disinterested

scholar, Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson, was commencing his long residence

in Nepal. Living continuously in that country for three-and-twenty

years, and occupying from 1831 to 1843 the important post of British

Resident at Kathmandu, he was able to succeed in making the immense

collections of Buddhistic works which he afterwards, with a generosity

as great as his industry, made gratuitously accessible to European

scholars. “The real beginning of an historical and critical study of

the doctrines of Buddha,” says Professor Max Müller (“Chips,” i. 190),

“dates from the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact

that the original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in

Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal.” But there is no need to dwell

here on the well-known fact that an immense amount of such Sanskrit

literature was discovered by Mr. Hodgson in Nepal, and presented to the

Royal Asiatic Society, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Société

Asiatique of Paris. We have at present to deal only with the stores of

information which he extracted from Tibet. Mr. Hodgson not only

established the fact, Professor Max Müller goes on to say, “that some

of the Sanskrit documents which he recovered had existed in the

monasteries of Nepal ever since the second century of our era,” but he

also showed that “the whole of that collection had, five or six hundred

years later, when Buddhism became definitely established in Tibet, been

translated into the language of that country.” Of the sacred canon of

the Tibetans, translated into their language from Sanskrit, Mr. Hodgson

received a copy as a present from the Dalai Lama, and this he presented

to the East India Company. As early as 1828 he printed in the “Asiatic

Researches” (vol. xvi.) an article on Nepal and Tibet, in which he

stated that “the body of Bhotiya [i.e., Tibetan] literature now is, and

long has been, a mass of translations from Sanskrit; its language

native; its letters (like its ideas) Indian.” [21] To that statement he

in 1837 appended this note: “It is needless now to say how fully these

views have been confirmed by the researches of De Körös. It is but

justice to myself to add that the real nature of the Kahgyur and

Stangyur was expressly stated and proved by me to the secretary of the

Asiatic Society some time before M. De Körös’s ample revelations were

made. Complete copies of both collections have been presented by me to

the Honourable East India Company, and others procured for the Asiatic

Society, Calcutta: upon the latter M. De Körös worked.” It was a

fortunate combination which brought the special knowledge and the

patient industry of Csoma Körösi into contact with the immense mass of

materials obtained by Mr. Hodgson from Tibet.

Of the sacred canon of the Tibetans the following description is given

by Professor Max Müller, who refers to Köppen’s “Religion des Buddha”

as his authority: [22]—“It consists of two collections, commonly called

the Kanjur and Tanjur. The proper spelling of their names is

Bkah-hgyur, pronounced Kah-gyur, [23] and Bstan-hgyur, pronounced

Tan-gyur. The Kanjur consists, in its different editions, of 100, 102,

or 108 volumes folio. It comprises 1083 distinct works. The Tanjur

consists of 225 volumes folio, each weighing from four to five pounds

in the edition of Peking. Editions of this colossal code were printed

at Peking, Lhassa, and other places. The edition of the Kanjur

published at Peking, by command of the Emperor Khian-Lung, sold for

£600. A copy of the Kanjur was bartered for 7000 oxen by the Buriates,

and the same tribe paid 1200 silver roubles for a complete copy of the

Kanjur and Tanjur together. Such a jungle of religious literature—the

most excellent hiding-place, we should think, for Lamas and

Dalai-Lamas—was too much even for a man who could travel on foot from

Hungary to Tibet. The Hungarian enthusiast, however, though he did not

translate the whole, gave a most valuable analysis of this immense

Bible in the seventeenth volume of the ‘Asiatic Researches,’ sufficient

to establish the fact that the principal portion of it was a

translation from the same Sanskrit originals which had been discovered

in Nepal by Mr. Hodgson.”

The Sanskrit works which Mr. Hodgson so generously presented to the

Asiatic Society of Paris were soon turned to good account. From them M.

Eugène Burnouf drew the materials for his celebrated “Introduction à

l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien.” But of the Tibetan sacred writings,

which were also rendered available to European students, no great use

has ever been made except by two scholars. Csoma Körösi, as has been

already stated, published an “Analysis of the Tibetan Work entitled the

Kah-gyur,” and an “Abstract of the Contents of the Bstan-hgyur;” and M.

P. E. Foucaux brought out at Paris in 1847 his “Rgya Tch’er Rol Pa, ou

Développement des Jeux, contenant l’Histoire du Bouddha Çakya-Mouni,

traduit sur la Version Tibétaine du Bhahhgyour, et Revu sur l’Original

Sanskrit (Lalitavistâra).” M. Foucaux’s excellent work is too well

known to require more than a passing notice here. But as Csoma Körösi’s

Analyses are probably less familiar, it may be well to extract from

them a short account of the different sections of the colossal Tibetan

collection.

The first of its two parts, he remarks, is styled Ká-gyur, or vulgarly

Kán-gyur, [24] i.e., “Translation of Commandments,” being versions of

Sanskrit writings imported into Tibet, and translated there between the

seventh and thirteenth centuries, but mostly in the ninth. The copy on

which he worked at Calcutta, consisting of 100 volumes, “appears to

have been printed with the very wooden types that are mentioned as

having been prepared in 1731.” This first part comprises seven

divisions, which are in fact distinct works. These he names as

follows:—

1. Dulvá (“Discipline,” Sanskrit Vinaya). This division occupies

thirteen volumes, and deals with religious discipline and the education

of persons who adopt the religious life. It is subdivided into seven

parts as follows:—

1. “The Basis of Discipline or Education.” 4 vols.

2. “A Sútra on Emancipation.” 30 leaves.

3. “Explanation of Education.” 4 vols.

4. “A Sútra on Emancipation for the Priestesses or Nuns.” 36

leaves.

5. “Explanation of the Discipline or Education of the Priestesses

or Nuns, in one volume with the preceding tract.”

6. “Miscellaneous Minutiæ concerning Religious Discipline.” 2 vols.

7. The chief text-book (or the last work of the Dulvá class) on

education. 2 vols.

2. “Shés-rab-kyi-p’ha-rol-tu-p’hyin-pa (by contraction Shér-p’hyin,

pronounced Sher-ch’hin), Sans. Prajná páramitá, Eng. ‘Transcendental

wisdom.’” This division occupies twenty-one volumes, which all “treat

of speculative or theoretical philosophy, i.e., they contain the

psychological, logical, and metaphysical terminology of the Buddhists,

without entering into the discussion of any particular subject.”

3. “Sangs-rgyas-p’hal-po-ch’hè, or by contraction P’hal-ch’hen, Sans.

Buddhāvataṇsaka, ... Association of Buddhas, or of those grown wise.”

This division contains six volumes, the subject of the whole being

“moral doctrine and metaphysics. There are descriptions of several

Tathágatas or Buddhas, their provinces, their great qualifications,

their former performances for promoting the welfare of all animal

beings, their praises, and several legends. Enumeration of several

Bodhisatwas, the several degrees of their perfections, their practices

or manners of life, their wishes, prayers, and efforts for making happy

all animal beings.”

4. “Dkon-mch’hog-brtségs-pa, or by contraction Dkon-brtségs (pronounced

kon-tségs). In Sans. Ratna-kúṭa, the ‘Jewel-peak,’ or precious things

heaped up, or enumeration of several qualities and perfections of

Buddha and his instructions. The subject, as in the former division,

still consists of morals and metaphysics, mixed with many legends and

collections of the tenets of the Buddhistic doctrine.”

5. “Mdo-sdé (Sans. Sútránta), or simply Mdo (Sans. Sútra), signifying a

treatise or aphorism on any subject. In a general sense, when the whole

Káh-gyur is divided into two parts, Mdo and Rgyud, all the other

divisions except the Rgyud are comprehended in the Mdo class. But in a

particular sense there are some treatises which have been arranged or

put under this title. They amount to about 270, and are contained in

thirty volumes. The subject of the works contained in these thirty

volumes is various.... The greatest part of them consist of the moral

and metaphysical doctrine of the Buddhistic system, the legendary

accounts of several individuals, with allusions to the sixty or

sixty-four arts, to medicine, astronomy, and astrology. There are many

stories to exemplify the consequences of actions in former

transmigrations, descriptions of orthodox and heterodox theories, moral

and civil laws, the six kinds of animal beings, the places of their

habitations, and the causes of their being born there; cosmogony and

cosmography according to the Buddhistic notions, the provinces of

several Buddhas, exemplary conduct of life of any Bodhisatwa or saint,

etc.” It is the second volume of this section which M. Foucaux has

translated.

6. “Mya-n̄an-las-hdas-pa, or by contraction Myang-hdas (Sans. Nirváṇa),

two vols. The title of these two volumes is in Sanskrit Mahá

parinirváṇa sútra.... A sútra on the entire deliverance from pain.

Subject, Shákya’s death under a pair of Sál trees near the city of

Kusha or Kámarúpa, in Assam. Great lamentation of all sorts of animal

beings on the approaching death of Shákya, their offerings or

sacrifices presented to him, his lessons, especially with regard to the

soul. His last moments, his funeral, how his relics were divided, and

where deposited.”

7. “Rgyud-sdé, or simply Rgyud, Sans. Tantra, or the Tantra class, in

twenty-two volumes. These volumes in general contain mystical theology.

There are descriptions of several gods and goddesses, instructions for

preparing the mandalas or circles for the reception of these

divinities, offerings or sacrifices presented to them for obtaining

their favour, prayers, hymns, charms, &c., &c., addressed to them.

There are also some works on astronomy, astrology, chronology,

medicine, and natural philosophy.”

Of the second great division of the Tibetan sacred books Csoma Körösi

gives only a brief abstract, “without mentioning the Sanscrit titles of

the works” from which its contents have been translated. It will be

sufficient to quote the opening lines of his article.

“The Bstan-Hgyur is a compilation in Tibetan of all sorts of literary

works, written mostly by ancient Indian Pandits and some learned

Tibetans, in the first centuries after the introduction of Buddhism

into Tibet, commencing with the seventh century of our era. The whole

makes 225 volumes. It is divided into two classes, the Rgyud and Mdo

(Tantra and Sútra classes in Sanscrit). The Rgyud, mostly on tantrika

rituals and ceremonies, makes 87 volumes. The Mdo, on science and

literature, occupies 136 volumes. One separate volume contains hymns or

praises on several deities and saints, and one volume is the index for

the whole.” [25]

In the year 1830, while Csoma Körösi was still pursuing his studies in

the monasteries of Western Tibet, a Russian official, Baron Schilling

de Canstadt, was beginning to look for Tibetan books in Eastern

Siberia. His first visit, he says, [26] to the monastery of Tchikoï,

twelve leagues from Kiachta, the town in which he was stationed, made

him aware that it possessed a copy of the Kah-gyur, as well as other

sacred books, which were ranged on either side of the altar, wrapped in

red and yellow coverings. As the Russian ecclesiastical mission to

Pekin was then on the point of starting from Kiachta, he offered to

obtain by its means from China such books as the priests might require.

They gladly accepted his offer, and made out lists of Tibetan books,

which proved of great service to him, especially after they had been

supplemented by the additions which were made by a Lama who visited him

at Kiachta. He still further ingratiated himself with the priests by

presenting them with a lo or tum-tum, which he procured from the

nearest Chinese town, as well as by the respect he showed for their

sacred books. For when he was allowed to handle a volume of their copy

of the Kah-gyur, he took care to touch the margins only of the leaves,

not the holy printed part.

It happened that the chief of a tribe of Tsongols possessed a copy of a

part of the Kah-gyur, and this he gave to the appreciative stranger,

who rose still higher in the opinion of the natives when they found

that he had ordered a silken wrapper to be made for each of the volumes

presented to him. He himself was delighted, he says, at becoming “the

proprietor of the first Tibetan work of any length which had up to that

time passed into the hands of a European.” After all this he was well

received wherever he went. A prediction had been made a year before

that a foreign convert to Buddhism, destined to spread that religion in

the West, was about to visit Mongolia, and this prophecy was

interpreted in his favour. The Buriat Lamas even looked upon him as “a

Khoubil-ghan, an incarnation of an important personage in the Buddhist

Pantheon.” After a time he organised a band of copyists, sometimes

twenty in number, who lived in tents in his courtyard, and frequently

consumed as much as a hundred pounds of beef in a day, besides much

brick tea, a caldron being kept always on the boil for their use. At

the end of a year he possessed a collection of Mongol and Tibetan

books, containing two thousand works and separate treatises.

Happening to visit the temple of Subulin, he found that the Lamas were

manufacturing an enormous prayer wheel. He offered to get the printing

of the oft-repeated prayer done for them at St. Petersburg, whereby

their machine would be rendered far more efficacious than if they

trusted to native typography. They accepted his offer gladly, and to

prove their gratitude, presented to him, in the name of the tribe, a

complete copy of the Kah-gyur which they possessed, having obtained it

from a Mongol Lama. Both parties to this transaction were equally

pleased; for when the printed leaves came from St. Petersburg, it was

found that each of them contained 2500 repetitions of the sacred

formula, and the words were printed in red ink, which is 108 times more

efficacious than black; and the paper itself was stamped with the same

words instead of bearing the maker’s name. So the Buriates were

charmed, and so was the European bibliophile, who had got possession of

what he had scarcely hoped ever to obtain, a copy of the Kah-gyur in

101 volumes, printed in the monastery of Nartang in Western Tibet. This

copy, after the death of Baron Schilling de Canstadt, was purchased

from his heirs by the Emperor Nicholas, and presented to the Academy of

Sciences.

M. Vasilief, the well-known author of the “History of Buddhism,” which

has been translated from Russian into French and German, says [27] that

when he was at Pekin he made inquiries about the Kah-gyur and Tan-gyur,

and he was shown the building in which they used to be printed. But no

edition, he was told, had been brought out for some time. Some of the

wood blocks were lost, others had suffered injury. However, a copy of

each work was procured by the Chinese Government and presented to the

Russian mission. These copies are now in St. Petersburg. The Mongol

Buriates of Russia, M. Vasilief states, are even more devoted to their

religion, and look to Lhassa more longingly than their kinsmen in

Mongolia itself. They read their sacred books, or hear them read, in

Tibetan, and are edified, even though they do not comprehend. Any one

who wishes to command a reading of the Kah-gyur or Tan-gyur addresses

himself to one of the monasteries which possess those works, pays a

certain price, and provides tea for the Lamas. A reading of the

Kah-gyur, it seems, used to come to about fifteen pounds at one of the

monasteries, exclusive of tea. At a given signal all the Lamas flock

together, and take their places according to seniority. Before each are

placed a number of leaves of the work, and off they set, all reading at

once, so that the entire performance occupies only a few hours, after

which each reader receives his share of the offering made by the

orderer of the function.

Of the Russian scholars who availed themselves of the presence of the

two editions of the Kah-gyur at St. Petersburg, the most enthusiastic

and industrious was the late Professor Anton von Schiefner. From the

Dulvā, the first of the seven divisions of that work, he translated

into German the legends and tales, an English version of which is

contained in the present volume. His German versions all appeared in

the “Mélanges Asiatiques tirés du Bulletin de l’Académie Impériale des

Sciences de St. Pétersbourg” (tom. vi.–viii.), with the exceptions of

Nos. 2 and 5, which were published in the “Mémoires” of that Society

(series vii., tom. xix., No. 6). Professor Schiefner, if he had lived

another year, would have doubtless supplied a number of additional

notes, and would have written an Introduction to the work. His lamented

death on November 16, 1880, has deprived the present volume of what

would probably have been one of its most interesting parts. It was at

Professor Schiefner’s express wish that the present translation was

undertaken. It must be a subject of universal regret that he did not

live to witness its appearance in print. The following tribute to his

merits as a scholar was contributed, soon after his death, by Professor

Albrecht Weber to “Trübner’s Record.”

“Professor F. Anton von Schiefner was a distinguished scholar of most

various attainments. His specialty, however, was Tibetan, and more

particularly the investigation of Buddhist legends of Indian and

Occidental origin, a collection of which in English will soon be

published by Messrs. Trübner & Co. He had, moreover, devoted himself

with rare perseverance and disinterestedness to the utilisation and

publication of the labours of two scholars whose own restless activity

would, without him, have been almost entirely lost to the scientific

world—namely, those of the Finnic linguist, Alexander Castrèn, and of

the Caucasian linguist, Baron von Uslar. One might—sit venia

verbo—almost say that both men had found in Schiefner their Homer. He

edited the labours of Castrèn almost wholly from the posthumous papers

of that brave and modest man, who, from 1838 to 1849, explored, under

the greatest privations, the inhospitable regions of Norway, Lapland,

and Siberia, where the tribes of the Finnic race are seated. Castrèn’s

Reiseerinnerungen and Reiseberichte, edited by Schiefner, present a

vivid picture of the hardships Castrèn had to go through, and which

finally caused his premature death, in 1852, at the age of thirty-nine.

We have lying before us the twelve volumes of his Samoyedan and

Tungusian Grammars and Vocabularies, as well as those of the languages

of the Buryats, Koibals, Karagasses, Ostyaks, &c.; his ethnological

lectures on the Altaic races, and those on Finnic mythology—all worked

out by Schiefner’s deft hand, and edited by him from 1835 to 1861. In

connection therewith Schiefner also made a German translation of the

Finnic national epos Kalevala, and also one of the Hero-Sagas of the

Minussin Tatars. Schiefner was more advantageously situated in working

up the collections of the estimable Caucasian linguist, Major-General

von Uslar (1816 to 1873), written in the Russian language, with whom,

until the General’s death, he was always able to confer directly. While

Schiefner’s own and entirely independent work on the Thush language

(1856), by the accuracy with which a hitherto quite uncultivated and

altogether strange department was opened to linguistic investigation,

had obtained for the author general appreciation, the united efforts of

both scholars have furnished surprising results as regards these highly

peculiar languages of the Caucasian mountaineers—the Avares, Abchases,

Tchetchenzes, Kasikumüks, Kurines—which by their extraordinary sounds,

as well as by their most singular grammatical structure, produce so

very strange an impression. The personal intercourse with soldiers of

Caucasian origin, garrisoned at St. Petersburg, was herein of high

importance to Schiefner. His amiable and open manner in personal

intercourse, characteristic of the whole man, bore him excellent fruit

in this case. Science, and especially the St. Petersburg Academy of

Sciences, has by Schiefner’s death sustained a heavy, indeed a quite

irreparable, loss.” [28]

The edition of the Kah-gyur on which Professor Schiefner worked appears

(says M. Vasilief, the author of the “History of Buddhism”) to have

been that in 108 volumes, printed at Pekin during the eighteenth

century, and presented to the Asiatic Museum of the St. Petersburg

Academy of Sciences by the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs, which had received it, about the year 1850, from the

Russian Mission in China.

The notes to the present volume signed S. are by Professor Schiefner. A

few others have been added, consisting for the most part of extracts

from Professor Monier Williams’s Sanskrit Dictionary. The forms of

Indian names adopted by Professor Schiefner have been retained in the

English translation, with certain modifications—y being substituted for

j, for instance, ch for tsh, and j for dsh. It ought to be stated that

Professor Schiefner made several important corrections on the sheets

which he prepared for the use of his English translator, and therefore

the English version will sometimes be found to differ materially from

the German text. [29]

To European folk-tales the longer legends of the Kahgyur bear but

little resemblance, though many of the fables about animals, and other

short stories towards the end of the present volume, have their

counterparts in the West. Here and there, however, even in the long

narratives of the legendary class, certain features may be recognised

as being common to both Europe and Asia. The moral of King Māndhātar’s

story (No. 1), for instance, seems to be identical, different as is its

machinery, with that of a story which is current in many Western lands.

That monarch, after conquering the whole earth, ascends into the

heavenly home of the thirty-three gods, and is allowed to share the

throne of their chief, Śakra or Indra. But at last he wishes for too

much. “He came to the conclusion that he must expel the king of the

gods, Śakra, from his throne, and take into his own hands the

government of both gods and men.” As soon as he had conceived this

idea, “the great King Māndhātar came to the end of his good fortune,”

and soon afterwards he died. The most familiar form of the European

story, which inculcates a similar moral teaching, is the German tale of

“The Fisherman and his Wife” (the 19th of Grimm’s Collection). In it, a

grateful fish for a long time accedes to every desire expressed by the

fisherman. He and his wife become first rich, then noble, and

eventually royal. But the fisherman’s wife is not satisfied with being

a queen. She wishes to be the Pope, and the fish fulfils her desire.

Even then she is discontented, and at last she demands to be made God.

When the fish is told this by her husband, it replies, “Go back, and

you will find her in her hovel.” The fisherman’s good fortune has come

to an end. He and his wife are poor folks once more. In a Hesse variant

the husband’s final wish is, “Let me be God, and my wife the Mother of

God.” [30]

A curious parallel to one of the incidents in King Māndhātar’s story is

afforded by a Polynesian myth. On the crown of King Utposhadha’s head,

according to the Tibetan tale, “there grew a very soft tumour, somewhat

resembling a cushion of cotton or wool, without doing him any harm.

When it had become quite ripe and had broken, there came forth from it

a boy, shapely and handsome.” Mr. Gill tells us in his interesting

“Myths and Songs from the South Pacific” (p. 10), that Tangaroa and

Rongo were the children of Vātea, the father of gods and men, and his

wife Papa. “Tangaroa should have been born first, but gave precedence

to his brother Rongo. A few days after the birth of Rongo, his mother

Papa suffered from a very large boil on her arm. She resolved to get

rid of it by pressing it. The core accordingly flew out; it was

Tangaroa! Another account, equally veracious, says that Tangaroa came

right up through Papa’s head. The precise spot is indicated by ‘the

crown’ with which all their descendants have since been born.”

Professor Schiefner mentions that a suggestion has been made to the

effect that “the name of Utposhadha may be a transformation of the

Greek Hephæstus, though the part which the latter plays in the Greek

myth at the birth of Athene is of a different nature.” But this seems

to be going unnecessarily far.

The story of Kuśa, No. 2, may be linked with the numerous European

variants of the tale which we know so well under the title of “Beauty

and the Beast.” The principal feature of that tale is the union of a

beautiful maiden with a monster of some kind, whose monstrosity is

eventually cured by her love and devotion. The Beast with whom the

Beauty is linked is generally a supernatural monster, and possesses the

power of at times divesting itself of its monstrous or bestial envelope

or husk, and appearing in its real form as a fairy prince or other

brilliant being. It is, as a general rule, only at night in the dark

that this transformation takes place. In some cases, as in the Cupid

and Psyche story, the wife is forbidden to look upon her husband. He

visits her only in utter darkness. But in many versions of the story

she is allowed to see her pseudo-monster in all his brilliant beauty.

He is often a deity, whom some superior divinity has degraded from the

sky and compelled to live upon earth under a monstrous shape. One day

the wife lays her hands on her husband’s monstrous envelope or husk and

destroys it. The spell being thus broken, the husband either flies away

to heaven or remains living on earth in uninterrupted beauty.

In some of the European variants, the original idea having apparently

been forgotten, the transformation appears not only grotesque but

unreasonable. Thus in a Wallachian tale (Schott, No. 23), a princess is

married to “a pumpkin,” or at least to a youth who is a pumpkin by day.

Wishing to improve her husband, she one day puts him in the oven and

bakes him, whereupon he disappears for ever. In a German story (Grimm,

No. 127), a princess who has lost her way in a wood is induced to marry

an iron stove. But the disfiguring “husk” is in most cases the hide or

skin of some inferior animal, an ass, a monkey, a frog, or the like, or

else the outside of a hideous man. Sometimes it is a brilliant female

being who is after this fashion “translated.” Thus an Indian story [31]

tells of a prince who was obliged to take a monkey as his wife. But

when she liked she could slip out of her monkey skin and appear as a

beautiful woman arrayed in the most magnificent apparel. She adjured

her husband to take great care of her “husk” during her absence from

it. But one day he burnt it, hoping to force her to be always

beautiful. She shrieked “I burn!” and disappeared. In a Russian variant

of the same story a prince is compelled to marry a frog, which is “held

in a bowl” while the marriage service is being performed. But when it

so pleases her, his frog-wife “flings off her skin and becomes a fair

maiden.” One day he burns her “husk,” and she disappears. In the

Tibetan story of Kuśa, the “Beast” is merely an ugly man disfigured by

“the eighteen signs of uncomeliness.” [32] On that account it was

decided that “he must never be allowed to approach his wife by

daylight.” But she caught sight of him one day, and her suspicions were

aroused. So she hid away a lighted lamp in her room, uncovered it

suddenly when her husband was with her, shrieked out that he was a

demon, and fled away. After a time, however, won by his military

reputation, she said to herself, “As this youth Kuśa is excellently

endowed with boldness and courage, why should I dislike him?” And

straightway “she took a liking for him,” just as the Beauty of the

fairy-tale did for the Beast. It may be worth noticing that the

conch-shell which Kuśa sounds with such force that the ears of his

enemies are shattered, and they are either killed or put to flight,

finds a Russian parallel in the whistle employed by the brigand

Solovei, or Nightingale, whom Ilya of Murom overcomes. In the builmas,

or Russian metrical romances, he often figures; and when he sounds his

whistle his enemies fall to the ground, nearly or quite dead.

No. 3, which chronicles some of the wise judgments of King Ādarśamukha,

comprises two different stories—the first narrating the ingenuity with

which the king satisfied the demands of a number of complainants

without injuring the man who had involuntarily given rise to their

complaints; the second describing a journey made by a traveller who was

commissioned by various persons, animals, or other objects, passed by

him on his way, to ask certain questions on his arrival at his

destination. The latter story is one which is familiar to Eastern

Europe. In one of its Russian variants a peasant hospitably receives an

old beggar, who adopts him as his brother, and invites him to pay him a

visit. On his way to the beggar’s home, he is appealed to by children,

who say, “Christ’s brother, ask Christ whether we must suffer here

long.” Later on, girls engaged in ladling water from one well into

another beg him to ask the same question on their account. When he

arrives at his journey’s end he becomes aware that his beggar friend is

Christ himself; and he is informed that the children he had passed on

the way had been cursed by their mothers while still unborn, and so

were unable to enter Paradise; and the girls had, while they were

alive, adulterated the milk they sold with water, and were therefore

condemned to an eternal punishment resembling that of the Danaides

(Afanasief, “Legendui,” No. 8). The judgments attributed in the Tibetan

tale to King Ādarśamukha, and in another Tibetan work, the “Dsanglun”

(as Professor Schiefner has remarked) to King Mdges-pa, form the

subject of a story well known in Russia under the title of “Shemyakin

Sud,” or “Shemyaka’s Judgment.” It exists there as a folk-tale, but it

belongs to what may be called the chap-book literature of the country,

and it is derived from literary sources. A variant given by Afanasief

(“Skazki,” v., No. 19) closely resembles part of the Tibetan tale. A

poor man borrowed from his rich brother a pair of oxen, with which he

ploughed his plot of ground. Coming away from the field he met an old

man, who asked to whom the oxen belonged. “To my brother,” was the

reply. “Your brother is rich and stingy,” said the old man; “choose

which you will, either his son shall die or his oxen.” The poor man

thought and thought. He was sorry both for the oxen and for his

brother’s son. At last he said, “Better let the oxen die.” “Be it as

you wish,” said the old man. When the poor man reached his home the

oxen suddenly fell down dead. The rich brother accused him of having

worked them to death, and carried him off to the king. On his way to

the king’s court the poor man, according to the chap-book version

(“Skazki,” viii. p. 325), accidentally sat down upon a baby and killed

it, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but only

succeeded in crushing an old man whose son was taking him into the

river for a bath. He had also had the misfortune to pull off a horse’s

tail without meaning it. When summoned into court for all these

involuntary offences, he took a stone in his pocket tied up in a

handkerchief, and stealthily produced it when he was had up before the

judge, saying to himself, “If the judge goes against me I will kill him

with this.” The judge fancied that the stone was a bribe of a hundred

roubles which the defendant wished to offer him; so he gave judgment in

his favour in each case. The poor man was to keep his brother’s horse

until its tail grew again, and to marry the woman whose child he had

crushed, and to stand under the bridge from which he had jumped and

allow the son of the man he had killed to jump off the bridge on to

him. The owner of the horse, the husband of the woman, and the son of

the crushed man were all glad to buy off the culprit whom they had

brought up for judgment. The satirical turn of the story and the

allusion to bribe-taking are characteristic features of the Russian

variants of this well-known Eastern tale. The Russian story takes its

title from the notorious injustice and oppression of Prince Demetrius

Shemyaka, who blinded his cousin, Vasily II., Grand Prince of Moscow,

and for a time usurped his throne. To this day an unjust legal decision

is known as a Shemyaka judgment. But in the Eastern versions of the

story, which are numerous, there is no mention of injustice; stupidity,

however, is sometimes attributed by them to the judge. Thus in the

Kathá Sarit Ságara [33] the story of Devabhúti tells how the excellent

wife of the learned Brahman of that name “went into the kitchen garden

to get vegetables, and saw a donkey belonging to a washerman eating

them. So she took up a stick and ran after the donkey, and the animal

fell into a pit as it was trying to escape and broke its hoof. When its

master heard of that, he came in a passion and beat with a stick and

kicked the Brahman woman. Accordingly she, being pregnant, had a

miscarriage, but the washerman returned home with his donkey. Then her

husband, hearing of it, came home after bathing, and, after seeing his

wife, went in his distress and complained to the chief magistrate of

the town. The foolish man immediately had the washerman, whose name was

Balásura, brought before him, and, after hearing the pleadings of both

parties, delivered this judgment: ‘Since the donkey’s hoof is broken,

let the Bráhman carry the donkey’s load for the washerman until the

donkey is again fit for work, and let the washerman make the Bráhman’s

wife pregnant again, since he made her miscarry. Let this be the

punishment of the two parties respectively.’ When the Bráhman heard

this, he and his wife in their despair took poison and died. And when

the king heard of it, he put to death that inconsiderate judge.”

As they deal with the subject of wise judgment, the seventh and eighth

stories may be spoken of next. One of them describes the cleverness of

a girl, the other that of a lad. Each of them is very popular in the

East, and both of them find more or less complete counterparts in the

West. There is a well-known group of folk-tales familiar to most

European and Asiatic lands, the theme of which is the sharpness of a

woman’s wits. Just as there thrive among the common people of all

countries many jeers and flouts against women, such as the proverbs “A

woman’s hair is long, but her mind is short,” and “A woman is worse

than a dog, for it does not bark at its master,” or stories

illustrative of a wife’s obstinacy, folly, or perfidy, so there

flourish by their side numerous popular arguments in favour of women,

generally conveyed in the form of stories. In the Perso-Turkish

story-book of “The Forty Viziers,” a tale accusing women frequently

alternates with one told in their defence. The framework of the

collection is as follows:—A wicked queen calumniates her stepson as

Phædra calumniated Hippolytus. His father sentences him to death. But

the forty ministers intercede for him, each of them daily telling a

tale of which the aim generally is to show how little reliance can be

placed on a woman. Each night the queen tells a story which is usually

of quite the opposite tendency, pointing out that men are miserable

creatures, and that they are morally inferior to women. At the end of

the forty days and nights, the prince is allowed to speak in his own

defence (having been during that period prohibited by the astrologers

from opening his lips), and all goes well. Among encomiums upon women,

the story of Viśākhā (forming No. 7 of the present collection and a

part of No. 8) is entitled to rank high. Her discretion, intelligence,

and thoughtfulness for others, entitle her to an honourable place among

the heroines of popular fiction. One of her decisions of a knotty legal

point is specially interesting, as it belongs to the cycle of which

Solomon’s judgments in the case of the two disputing mothers is the

best known example. The actual mother and the adopted mother of a boy

dispute as to which is really his mother. The point is legally

important, for with the possession of the boy goes that of his deceased

father’s homestead. The case is referred to the king, whose ministers

investigate it, but in vain. At length Viśākhā is consulted. She

replies, “What need is there of investigation? Speak to the two women

thus: ‘As we do not know to which of you two the boy belongs, let who

is the strongest take the boy.’ When each of them has laid hold of one

of the boy’s hands and he begins to cry out on account of the pain, the

real mother will let go, being full of compassion for him, and knowing

that if her child remains alive she will be able to see it again. But

the other, who has no compassion for him, will not let go.” [34]

Professor Schiefner has called attention in a note to the article in

“Ausland” by the late Professor Benfey on the somewhat similar tale of

“Die Kluge Dirne,” and to the variant of the Viśākhā story given in Mr.

Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism.” There is a well-known folk-tale

about a woman’s intelligence, of which the Russian variant may be cited

here. It is the 6th of Khudyakoff’s collection of “Great Russian

Popular Tales” (Moscow, 1860). A peasant girl was so intelligent that

she solved all the problems proposed to her by a certain judge. Charmed

by her cleverness, he married her. But he stipulated that if she ever

found fault with any of his legal decisions she was to be divorced, and

was bound to return at once to her father’s cottage. Only she was to be

allowed to take away with her whatever thing she liked best in her

husband’s house. All went well for some time with the judge and his

clever wife. At length she heard him deliver a preposterous judgment in

court, and she could not help protesting against it. Accordingly she

was ordered to return to her father’s hut. She obeyed, but she took

with her the judge, to whom she had administered so much liquor before

leaving, that she was able to drive him in a cart tranquilly sleeping.

When he awoke, and found himself in his father-in-law’s cottage, he

naturally asked how he got there. “I brought you away with me,” replied

the divorced wife. “You know I was entitled to take away whatever I

liked best in your house, and I chose you.” [35] There is a very

interesting story of the same kind in Radloff’s great collection of

songs and tales from Central Asia (“Proben der Volkslitteratur der

türkischen Stämme Sud-Sibiriens,” vol. iii. pp. 347–354). There was

once a choleric khan who understood the language of birds. He ordered

his vizier one day to find out what two geese had said to each other as

they flew past, threatening to put him to death if he failed to do so.

The vizier applied for help to the khan’s wise daughter, who gave him

the information he required. He promised not to mention his informant,

but he broke his promise. The khan was so angry with his daughter, when

he found out that it was she who had told the vizier what the geese had

said, that he gave her in marriage to the most miserable specimen of

humanity he could find. She proved an excellent wife to her unsightly

and poverty-stricken husband, and he and she prospered in consequence.

[36]

The story of the cleverness of Mahaushadha (No. 8) forms the

counterpart of that of Viśākhā, who herself plays a part in the tale,

which is told at somewhat tedious length. Some of its incidents will be

familiar to readers of Western folk-tales. Professor Schiefner has

called attention (in a footnote to page 129) to several variants of the

story of the mystic fowl—sometimes a cock, sometimes a hen or goose, a

layer of golden eggs—the eater of which is destined to become a king.

It forms the opening of the German story of “The Two Brothers” (Grimm,

No. 60, vol. iii. pp. 102–107); but in it the peculiarity of the bird

is stated to be that the eating of its heart and liver enables the

eater to become rich. Three Russian variants of the story are given by

Afanasief in his collection of “Russian Popular Tales” (v., No. 53,

viii., No. 26, and pp. 464–7). In all of them the eater of the bird or

a part of it becomes a king. Many mythologists [37] recognise in the

golden egg the Sun, which may be looked upon as a gleaming egg laid

every morning by the brooding Night. But the king-making power

attributed to the bird’s eaten flesh remains a mystery. In the story of

Mahaushadha, the boy Bahvannapāna, who has eaten the head of the mystic

cock, is elected king by the ministers at a certain court on account of

his good looks. Having gone forth in search of some successor to their

deceased monarch, they find him sleeping under a tree, “the shadow of

which never moved from his body,” and they exclaim, “As he is extremely

handsome, and is well provided with signs, we will invest him with the

sovereignty.” In the East-European variants the fortunate youth is

frequently chosen as king because his taper, when he takes one to

church, kindles of its own accord. One of the tasks which Mahaushadha

is called upon to execute by way of proving his cleverness is “to

supply some rice which had not been crushed with a pestle, and yet was

not uncrushed, and which had been cooked neither in the house nor out

of the house, neither with fire nor yet without fire,” and to send it

“neither along the road nor yet away from the road, without its being

shone upon by the daylight, but yet not in the shade,” by a messenger

who should be “not riding, but also not on foot” (page 139). Similar

tests frequently appear in European folk-tales. Thus, in one of the

Lithuanian Tales (Schleicher, No. 1), a gentleman promises to marry a

village maiden if she can fulfil certain conditions, saying, “If you

come to me neither clothed nor bare, not riding nor driving nor

walking, not along the road, nor beside the road, nor on the footpath,

in summer and likewise in winter, then will I marry you.” The abduction

of the mule which was watched by five men (page 142), one of whom sat

on its back while the others held its four legs, is evidently a

reminiscence of an ingenious theft commemorated in many such stories as

“The Master Thief” (Grimm, No. 192). But Mahaushadha’s contrivances for

making the dog talk and for keeping the sheep thin (page 175) are

novel. The latter, as a plan of working on the body through the eye,

may be compared with Jacob’s use of the rods which he placed “in the

watering-troughs when the flocks came to drink” (Genesis xxx. 38).

The “Clever Thief” (No. 4) is one of the numerous variants of the

well-known story which we generally associate with the treasure of

Rhampsinitos. [38] As Professor Schiefner has pointed out some of its

Western parallels (pp. 37 and 43), it is not necessary to do more here

than to add a few references to those which he has given. Professor

Schiefner has himself written on the subject. [39] The most recent

commentator is Professor G. Maspero, who has devoted to it four pages

of the Introduction to his collection of ancient Egyptian tales. [40]

The name of Rhampsinitos, he says, is a Greek form of the Egyptian name

Ram-sis-si-nit, or Ramses the son of Nit. Two objections, he remarks,

have been made to the supposition that the story is of Egyptian origin.

One is the nature of the masonry employed by the builders of the

treasury, which has been stated not to be in keeping with Egyptian

architectural practice. The other is the shaving of the beards of the

drunken soldiers who had been set to watch the corpse of the clever

thief’s comrade. This has been said to be an incident evidently not of

Egyptian origin, seeing that in Egypt only barbarians wore beards. But

Professor Maspero impugns both objections. He shows that some Egyptian

temples did actually possess hiding-places resembling that described in

the story; and as regards the shaving, he points out that in the first

place Egyptians could wear beards, and did wear them when they felt

inclined, and that in the second place the soldiers who guarded the

corpse would belong “to a tribe of Lybian origin of the name of

Matiou,” and therefore be fully entitled, in their capacity of

foreigners, to wear their beards. A modern Greek variant of the story

has been lately discovered in Cyprus, [41] and Mr. Tawney has recently

translated an Indian variant, [42] which offers a striking resemblance

to the Gaelic tale of “The Shifty Lad.” [43] The Tibetan tale, however,

is more nearly akin to the Egyptian form of the story than to that

which it takes in this Indian variant.

The story of Prince Sudhana (No. 5) has several points in common with

Western folk-tales. One of these is the capture by the hunter Phalaka

of the celestial maiden, the Kinnarī Manoharā, who becomes Sudhana’s

bride. This is effected by means of a “fast-binding chain” which the

hunter throws around her when she is bathing in a lake. Her companions

fly away heavenward, leaving her a captive on earth. This incident will

at once remind the reader of the captures of “swan-maidens” and other

supernatural nymphs, which so frequently occur in popular romance. It

is usually the swan’s feather-dress or bird-husk on which the liberty

of the captured maiden depends. While she is deprived of it she must

live on earth as a mortal’s wife. But if she can recover it, she

becomes a bird once more, and soars heavenward. Manoharā is captured by

means of a magic chain. But her power of flying through the air depends

upon her possession of a jewel. So long as she is without that, she

remains a slave; when she recovers it, she becomes free and flies

aloft. [44] Sudhana’s visit to the palace of his supernatural wife’s

father, and the task which is set him of recognising her amid her

ladies, bear a strong resemblance to the adventures which befall the

heroes of many tales current in Europe. A mortal youth often obtains,

and then for a time loses, a supernatural wife, generally represented

as the daughter of a malignant demon. He makes his way, like Sudhana,

to the demon’s abode. There tasks are set him, which he accomplishes by

means of his wife’s help. One of these is that he shall recognise her

when surrounded by her numerous sisters, each of whom is exactly like

her in appearance and dress. He calls upon her to step forth from among

them; she does so, and the recognition takes place.

As a specimen of an European variant of the tale may be taken the

Russian story of “The Water-King” (“Russian Folk-Tales,” No. 19). In it

a prince steals the dress of one of the water-king’s twelve daughters

while they are bathing. Her sisters become spoonbills and fly away, but

she remains in his power till he restores her dress. Then she also

flies away in spoonbill form. When he arrives after a time at her

father’s palace, she aids him to accomplish the tasks which are set

him. At last the water-king says, “Choose yourself a bride from among

my twelve daughters. They are all exactly alike in face, in hair, and

in dress. If you can pick out the same one three times running, she

shall be your wife; if you fail to do so, I shall have you put to

death.” The maiden whose dress he had stolen and restored enables him

to succeed in this task also. The recognition of Sudhana by his wife,

brought about by means of a ring, is an incident of which frequent use

is made in folk-tales. When a demon’s daughter, or a princess who has

been enslaved by a demon, has enabled a hero to escape along with her

from that demon’s power, she often warns him that he will forget her if

he, on his return home, kisses his mother (as in “Two Kings’ Children,”

Grimm, No. 113), or does something else which he has been forbidden to

do. He always neglects the warning and forgets his wife. But eventually

she manages to remind him of her existence, usually by means of a ring.

In the similar story of “The Mastermaid” (“Tales from the Norse,” No.

11), the recognition is due to a golden apple and two golden fowls

which the hero and heroine had carried off from a giant’s palace. In

“The Battle of the Birds” (Campbell’s “West Highland Tales,” No. 2),

the prince forgets the giant’s daughter after being kissed by “an old

greyhound,” but remembers her when he hears a conversation between a

golden pigeon and a silver pigeon which spring out of a glass offered

to his forgotten love. Similar parallels to this story will be found in

most of the large collections of European folk-tales.

A curious feature in the story is the ablution to which Manoharā is

subjected after her stay among mortals (p. 71), in order that “the

smell of humanity” may be “washed off her.” In a similar story in the

“Kathā Sarit Sāgara,” [45] a hero who has been deserted by his

celestial spouse, Bhadrā, wanders long in search of her. At length he

reaches a mountain lake to which come “to draw water many beautiful

women with golden pitchers in their hands.” He asks them why they are

drawing water, and they reply, “A Vidyádharí of the name of Bhadrá is

dwelling on this mountain; this water is for her to bathe in.”

Whereupon he slips into one of the pitchers the jewelled ring which his

wife had given him. And so it comes to pass that when “the water of

ablution” is poured over her, the ring falls into her lap. She

recognises it, and all goes well.

The long history of “Prince Jīvaka, the King of Physicians” (No. 6),

has little in common with Western folk-lore. The cures he performs, by

either opening the skull and removing from the brain headache-producing

centipedes, or else eliminating such similar intruders by a less heroic

operation, may, however, be likened to somewhat similar kinds of

surgical treatment mentioned in European folk-tales. Thus in a modern

Greek story [46] a girl is relieved from the presence of a number of

snakes which had taken up their abode within her by being suspended

from a branch of a tree above a caldron of boiling milk, the vapour

arising from which induced the reptiles to come forth. There is an

English story also of a country clergy-man who could obtain no rest

from headaches, till at last he induced the village blacksmith to hit

him on the head with his largest hammer. The ecclesiastic’s skull

cracked beneath the blow, and out came sufficient swarms of earwigs to

account for his complaint. But this story requires verification. The

cure effected at p. 103, to which no parallel is found in the variant

of the legend in Mr. Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” though the

skull-opening incident occurs in it (p. 242), resembles that brought

about by Kīrtisenā in the case of King Vasudatta’s headache in the

Kathā Sarit Sāgara. [47] She learnt how to treat the malady from a

Rākshasī, who gave the following instructions as to how the king might

be cured, unaware that a human being was listening:—“First his head

must be anointed by rubbing warm butter on it, and then it must be

placed for a long time in the heat of the sun, intensified by noonday.

And a hollow cane-tube must be inserted into the aperture of his ear,

which must communicate with a hole in a plate, and this plate must be

placed above a pitcher of cool water. Accordingly the centipedes will

be annoyed by heat and perspiration, and will come out of his head, and

will enter that cane-tube from the aperture of the ear, and, desiring

coolness, will fall into the pitcher.” Kīrtisenā carried out these

instructions, and the result was that she “extracted from the head of

that king, through the aperture of the ear, one hundred and fifty

centipedes.”

The lovely maiden Āmrapālī, the Dryad-like nymph who emerges (p. 85)

from the kadalī tree in the āmra grove, closely resembles the

tree-maidens who figure in some European popular tales. In the 21st of

Hahn’s “Griechische Märchen,” the stem of a laurel opens and forth

comes “a wondrously fair maiden.” In the sixth story of Basile’s

“Pentamerone,” a fairy comes forth in the same way from a date spray,

and in the second from a bilberry twig. The homes of the nymphs of this

class are as often flowers as trees. In a Russian story (Afanasief,

vi., No. 66), the heroine is transformed after death into a wondrous

blossom. At midnight “the blossom begins to tremble, then it falls from

its stem to the ground, and turns into a lovely maiden.” In the same

way the heroine of the German story of “The Pink” (Grimm, No. 76)

becomes a flower at her lover’s wish; and many other similar instances

might be quoted. All such ideas as these appear to have been originally

connected with the tree-worship which formed so important a part of the

religion of our remote ancestors, and on which so excellent a work was

written a few years ago by the late Wilhelm Mannhardt. [48]

Of special interest, as dealing with this kind of worship, is the

opening of the Buddhistic legend of Mahākāśyapa and Bhadrā (No. 9).

Tree-worship existed long before Buddhism was heard of, and it has

succeeded in maintaining its existence in many lands up to the present

day. There is no lack of stories relating to it; but it is not often

that we obtain so clear an insight into the ideas of tree-worshippers,

or are favoured with so detailed an account of the rites which they

were wont to celebrate, as are afforded by the description of the

childless Brahman’s appeal to the Nyagrodha tree (p. 187). It serves to

illustrate the confusion existing in the minds of tree-worshippers

between the material tree and its spiritual tenant. The Brahman

Nyagrodha, the tree’s namesake, first caused the ground in its

neighbourhood to be “sprinkled, cleansed, and adorned.” Then he set up

flags and banners, and provided a profusion of perfumes, flowers, and

incense. Finally, “he prayed to the tree-haunting deity,” promising to

pay that divine being due honour if a son should be born to him, but

threatening, in case he should remain childless, to cut down the tree

and split it into chips, destined to be consumed with fire. In another

passage of the Kah-gyur (vol. vi., p. 280) Professor Schiefner remarks

in a note appended to this passage, “Bhagavant gives directions that,

in case it is absolutely necessary to fell a tree, the work-masters of

the Bhikshus shall draw a circle around it seven or eight days before

felling it, offer up perfumes, flowers, and oblations, recite tantras

and utter spells, proclaim abhorrence of the path of the ten vices, and

moreover say, ‘Let the deity who inhabits this tree find another

dwelling. With this tree shall a religious or ecclesiastical work be

accomplished.’ Seven or eight days after this the tree may be felled.

But if any change be perceptible, it must not be felled. If none is

perceptible, then it may be cut down.”

One of the stories of the “Panchatantra” (the 8th of Book 5) may be

compared with the opening of No. 9, so far as tree-worship is

concerned, and with the already quoted (in illustration of No. 1)

German story about a wife’s unreasonable wishes. A weaver, who wanted

timber for a new loom, was about to fell a tree, when the spirit which

resided in it protested against the operation, and promised, if the

tree was spared, to fulfil any wish the weaver might express. The

weaver assented, but before specifying his wish he went home and

consulted his wife. She recommended him to ask for an additional pair

of hands and another head, for by their means he would be able to keep

two looms going instead of one. The weaver took his wife’s advice, and

requested the tree-spirit to render him two-headed and four-armed. “No

sooner said than done. In an instant he became equipped with a couple

of heads and four arms, and returned home highly delighted with his new

acquisitions. No sooner, however, did the villagers see him, than,

greatly alarmed, they exclaimed ‘a goblin! a goblin!’ and between

striking him with sticks and pelting him with stones speedily put an

end to his existence.” [49]

The greater part of No. 9, the account of the ascetic life led by

Bhadrā and her husband, belongs to a different world from that of

folk-lore, but in the “Acta Sanctorum,” and in some popular legends

derived from that source, parallels may be found equally conducive to

edification.

In No. 10, also, we are taken away from the region of folk-tales, but

this time into that of such literary fictions as form a part of the

“Thousand and One Nights.” It, also, is not of a very edifying nature;

but it is valuable as showing what utter nonsense many of the corrupted

Buddhistic legends contain, and illustrating the custom prevalent among

literary Buddhists (one in which they were perhaps surpassed by the

Christian compilers of such works as the “Gesta Romanorum”) of

appending an unexceptionable moral to a tale of an unsavoury nature.

The rapidity with which the narrator, at the close of the story of

Utpalavarṇā, passes from the record of her dissoluteness to the account

of her conversion is somewhat startling. The same remark applies also

to the close of the history of Kṛiśā Gautamī (No. 11). That narrative

is as little edifying, for the most part, as the legend which precedes

it. One of the tricks resorted to in it, the lengthening at will, by

means of some magical substance, of the nose of an obnoxious

individual, frequently figures in popular tales. In one of the stories

from Central Asia (Jülg, “Mongolische Märchen,” No. 14), the fairies

elongate an intruder’s nose to such an extent that they are able to tie

seven knots in it. But they perform that operation by sheer force. In

European folk-tales the abnormal growth of the nose, or the sudden

appearance of horns or the like, is generally caused by the magical

properties of some fruit or other apparently harmless substance (Grimm,

No. 122, iii., 204, Hahn, No. 44). In the present case, the means

employed for the lengthening of the nose is a piece of wood, and a

piece of another kind of wood reverses the operation. In the folk-tales

the magical substance which produces the wished-for result is generally

discovered by accident. In the Tibetan legend its discovery is due to

its employer’s observation of a raven, which lengthened its beak by

rubbing it on a piece of wood when it wanted to get at a corpse

otherwise out of its reach, and afterwards reduced it to its normal

proportions when it had finished its meal. The magic lute which plays

so important a part in the story of Suśroṇī (No. 12) is of course

closely related to all the musical instruments of magic power which

both literature and folk-lore have rendered familiar, from the harp or

lyre of Orpheus or Amphion to the pipe of the Piper of Hameln, the

dance-inspiring fiddle of the German tales of “Roland” and “The Jew in

Thorns” (Grimm, Nos. 56 and 110), the magic flute which an angel gives

to the strong fool of the modern Greek story of Bakala (Hahn, No. 34),

and a number of similar instruments capable of making trees and rocks

reel and men and women wildly skip. In these dance-compelling

instruments many mythologists recognise symbols of the wind. [50] One

of the most interesting of the European folk-tales in which such

instruments occur is the Esthonian story of “Pikne’s Bagpipes,” of

which a full account is given by A. de Gubernatis in his “Zoological

Mythology” (i. 159–161), taken from Dr. Löwe’s excellent translation of

Kreutzwald’s collection (“Ehstnische Märchen,” No. 9). In it the

thunder-god is robbed of his bagpipes (toru-pil, “Röhreninstrument”) by

the devil, who hides it away in hell, keeping it in an iron chamber

guarded by seven locks. The consequence is that the clouds no longer

yield a drop of rain. The thunder-god, under the form of a boy, obtains

access to hell, and persuades the devil to let him play on the magic

bagpipes. Thereupon “the walls of hell quaked, and the devil and his

associates fainted away and fell to the ground as though dead.”

Returning home, the thunder-god “blew into his thunder-instrument till

the rain-gates opened and gave the earth to drink.” The termination of

the history of Suśroṇī is closely akin to that with which all complete

variants of the “Puss in Boots” story should end. They ought always to

conclude with the ingratitude of the hero or heroine of the tale to the

cat or fox or other animal which has made itself useful. The Marquis de

Carabas ought to have proved ungrateful to the Booted Cat, just as

Suśroṇī neglected to give her benefactor, the jackal, the daily meat

which she had promised it. The asseverations of the king’s wives in

this story, and those of the hero and heroine of No. 18, may be

compared with the similar affirmations of the heroine of the 26th of M.

Legrand’s “Contes Populaires Grecs.” In it a king suffers from a

strange malady, three branches having grown over his heart. His

disguised sister tells him her story, and adds, “If I tell the truth, O

my king, may one of the branches break which is over your heart!” By

three such asseverations she breaks all three branches.

The story (No. 13) of the actor who dramatises the life of Buddha, and

is punished for his audacity in making fun of the Six Bhikshus, soars

high above the region of folk-lore. And there is but little in European

popular fiction which can be likened to the legend of “The Dumb

Cripple” (No. 14), who pretended to be unable to speak or walk, in

order that he might not be made a king, reflecting that, “if he were to

be invested with sovereign power, this would not be a good thing,

seeing that in consequence of a sixty years’ reign which he had

accomplished in a previous state of existence, he had been born again

in hell, and that he now ran the risk of going to hell a second time.”

The same remark holds good of the not very edifying history of

Ṛshyaśringa or Gazelle Horn (No. 15), the ascetic who, out of spite,

prevents rain from falling until his asceticism and his magic power

collapse together.

The story of Viśvaṇtara (No. 16), the princely Bodisat, who not only

gives away all his property and retires into the forest of penance, but

even surrenders his two children to a cruel slave-owner, and finally

hands over his wife to a stranger who demands her, has been already

told by Mr. Spence Hardy in his “Manual of Buddhism” (pp. 116–124),

under the title of “The Wessantara Játaka;” but as it is one of the

most touching of the class of legends to which it belongs, having in it

more of human interest than such narratives generally contain, and as

the Tibetan variant is the more poetic and pathetic of the two

renderings of the tale, Professor Schiefner has done good service by

translating it. Such acts of renunciation as the princely Bodisat

accomplished do not commend themselves to the Western mind. An Oriental

story-teller can describe a self-sacrificing monarch as cutting slices

of flesh off his own arms and plunging them into the fire in honour of

a deity, and yet not be afraid of exciting anything but a religious

thrill among his audience. To European minds such a deed would probably

appear grotesque. And so the Eastern tales in praise of self-sacrifice

do not seem to have impressed the lay mind of Europe. On ecclesiastical

literature they probably exerted considerable influence. But folk-tales

do not often deal with such heroic operations as were performed by

Prince Viśvaṇtara in cutting himself loose from all worldly ties in

order that nothing might prevent him from becoming the consummate

Buddha. The sorrows of Madrī, the princely ascetic’s wife, who is

reduced by her husband’s passion for giving everything away first to

exile and poverty, then to bitter grief on account of the loss of her

dearly loved little children, and finally to slavery, but who submits

to all her husband’s commands, may be compared with those of the

patient Grisildes whose praises Chaucer has sung in “The Clerke’s

Tale.” The Clerk states in his prologue that the story was one which he

“lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,” whose name was “Fraunces Petrark,

the laureat poete;” Petrarch having freely translated it in the year

1373 from Boccaccio’s “Decamerone.” This story, however, appears to

have been current in Italy for some time before. In folk-tales the

similar sorrows of a wife who is condemned to a series of humiliations

by a harsh husband are often described; but the husband’s conduct is

generally accounted for by the fact that his wife had at first rejected

him with contumely, and he had made up his mind to retaliate. Patient

Grissel’s husband had absolutely no excuse to plead for his cruelty,

nor can much be said in extenuation of that of such a husband as the

German “King Thrushbeard” (Grimm, No. 52), the Norwegian “Hacon

Grizzlebeard” (“Tales from the Norse,” No. 6), or the Italian “King of

Fairland,” the husband of the proud Cintiella (Basile’s “Pentamerone,”

No. 40). The Russian variant of “Patient Grissel’s Story” (Afanasief,

v. No. 29) seems worthy of mention, as not being likely to be familiar

to Western Europe. A king marries a peasant’s daughter on condition

that she shall never find fault with anything he says or does. She

makes him an excellent wife, and never opposes his will, even when he

takes her children from her, pretending that they are to be put to

death, in order that his neighbours might not laugh at them as being

sprung from a peasant mother; or when he sends her back to her father’s

hut, and then recalls her from it as a servant, and orders her to get

ready the room intended for his new bride. But the Russian story, as it

stands alone (with the exception of the opening), is probably an echo

from abroad. [51]

In the Nidānakathā or “The Three Epochs” (translated in Mr. Rhys

Davids’s “Buddhist Birth-Stories,” p. 33), there is an account of the

great generosity of Mangala Buddha. “The story is, that when he was

performing the duties of a Bodhisatta, being in an existence

corresponding to the Vessentara existence, [52] he dwelt with his wife

and children on a mountain.” One day a demon named “Sharp-fang,”

hearing of his readiness to bestow gifts, “approached him in the guise

of a Brahmin, and asked the Bodhisatta for his two children. The

Bodhisatta, exclaiming, “I give my children to the Brahmin,” cheerfully

and joyfully gave up both the children, thereby causing the ocean-girt

earth to quake. The demon, standing by the bench at the end of the

cloistered walk, while the Bodhisatta looked on, devoured the children

like a bunch of roots. Not a particle of sorrow arose in the Bodhisatta

as he looked on the demon, and saw his mouth as soon as he opened it

disgorging streams of blood like flames of fire; nay, a great joy and

satisfaction welled within him as he thought, ‘My gift was well given,’

and he put up the prayer, ‘By the merit of this deed may rays of light

one day issue from me in this very way.’ In consequence of this prayer

of his it was that the rays emitted from his body when he became Buddha

filled so vast a sphere.” Another strange Indian story about

self-sacrifice is that of the Dānava or Titan Namuchi, [53] who “did

not refuse to give anything to anybody that asked, even if he were his

enemy.” Having practised asceticism for ten thousand years “as a

drinker of smoke,” he was allowed by Brahmā to become, like Balder,

proof against all the ordinary forces of nature. After that he

frequently made war against Indra, and often overcame him. When the

gods and the Asuras churned the ocean of milk with the mountain

Mandara, Namuchi received, as his share in the products of the

churning, a horse which had the power of restoring to life, by a sniff,

any Asura whom the gods had killed. This gave him great power. At

length Indra went to Namuchi and asked for that horse as a gift.

Namuchi gave it, and Indra, “as he could not be slain by any other

weapon, killed him with foam of the Ganges, in which he had placed a

thunderbolt.” However, he was born again as “an Asura composed all of

jewels,” and he conquered Indra a hundred times. “Then the gods took

counsel together, and came to him, and said to him, ‘By all means give

us your body for a human sacrifice.’ When he heard that, he gave them

his own body, although they were his enemies: noble men do not turn

their backs on a suppliant, but bestow on him even their lives.”

The story of a charitable monarch, whose uprightness and generosity are

put to a severe test by a deity, occurs as a folk-tale in Miss Maive

Stokes’s “Indian Fairy Tales” (No. 13). It properly belongs to

literature, in which it has assumed various forms, one of which has

been made known to English readers by the late Sir Mutu Coomāra Swāmy

in his “Arichandra, or the Martyr of Truth; a Drama translated from the

Tamil.” The story as told by an Indian ayah takes this form. There was

a king named Harchand, who “used to pray a great deal to God, and God

was very fond of him,” but thought fit to test his goodness. So one

day, when he had promised an ascetic “two pounds and a half of gold,”

all his wealth was turned into charcoal. In order to keep his word,

Harchand was obliged to sell his wife and child for a pound and a half

of gold, and then he sold himself for the other pound. Having become

the property of “a Dom, that is, a man of a very low caste, who kept a

tank into which it was his business to throw the bodies of those who

died,” he was charged with the care of the tank, and ordered to take a

rupee in payment for each adult corpse, eight annas for a dead child,

or a piece of cloth, in case the bearers of the body had no money. One

day his wife arrived, bearing the corpse of his son, who had died. She

had no money, but she said to herself, “I know that man is my husband,

so he will not take any money for throwing his child into the water.”

But he was so honest, in the interests of his master, that he insisted

upon a fee, which had to be paid at the expense of his wife’s single

covering. Eventually all went well, the dead boy was restored to life,

and when the reunited royal family returned home, “the garden was in

splendid beauty; the charcoal was turned back into gold, and silver,

and jewels; the servants were in waiting as usual, and they went into

the palace and lived happily for evermore.”

The principal theme of “The Fulfilled Prophecy” (No. 17) is one that

often occurs in popular tales, many of which are devoted to proving how

impossible it is for a man, whatever crimes he may commit, to escape

from his destiny. The “Two Brothers” (No. 18) is one of the great cycle

of moral tales in which goodness is contrasted with badness, to the

temporary advantage but eventual discomfiture of the latter. The

blinding of the good brother by the bad is an incident suggestive of

the opening of the well-known folk-tales of “True and Untrue” (“Tales

from the Norse,” No. 1), the “Two Wanderers” (Grimm, No. 107), and a

great number of similar stories, to many of which references are given

in vol. iii. p. 189, of Grimm’s collection.

Stories about ungrateful wives are popular in Asia. In No. 21, “How a

woman requites love,” a husband twice saves his wife’s life, once by

rescuing her from his brothers, who proposed to feed upon her when

destitute of other food in a desert, and again by supplying her with

food and drink, much to his own inconvenience, when she was faint from

hunger and thirst. “He sliced some flesh off his thighs,” says the

narrator, “and gave it to her to eat; and then he opened the veins of

both his arms and gave her the blood to drink.” In spite of which, she

conspired against him with a handless and footless cripple. In one of

the Indian variants of the story (“Panchatantra,” iv. 5), the husband’s

self-sacrifice takes a more poetic form. In the midst of a forest a

wife suffered intensely from thirst. Her husband went to seek water.

When he came back with some his wife was dead. A voice was heard saying

that if he would give up half of his own life hers would be renewed. He

immediately pronounced a formula by which he surrendered half of his

life, and his wife was thereby resuscitated. Soon afterwards, being in

a garden one day during the absence of her husband, she heard a cripple

singing so beautifully that she fell in love with him at once. So she

took an early opportunity of pushing her husband into a well. After

which she led a wandering life, carrying about the cripple in a basket

on her head. But her husband, who had not been killed by his fall,

escaped from the well, and at length confronted her one day in the

presence of a king, and demanded back the half of his life which he had

given her. She uttered formal words of surrender and fell dead. The

Indian variant of the story in the Daśakumāracharita is closely akin to

the Tibetan, the husband assuaging his wife’s hunger and thirst by

means of his own flesh and blood, and being rewarded by being pushed

into a well by his wife, who had fallen in love with a cripple whose

hands, feet, nose, and ears had been cut off by robbers. [54] This

story appears to be the original of a singular Mongol tale (Jülg’s

“Mongolische Märchen,” p. 105). A man and his wife were walking along

near a cliff, when they heard so lovely a voice resounding that the

woman said to herself, “I should like to belong to the man who

possesses so charming a voice,” and she proceeded to push her husband

into a well. Then she set off in search of the possessor of the voice.

When she found him, he turned out to be a loathsome invalid, whose

groans had been rendered melodious by the echoing cliff. Full of

remorse, she tried to make up for the murder of her husband by carrying

away the invalid, under whose disagreeable weight she pined away and

eventually died (Benfey, “Panchatantra,” i. pp. 436–444). The form

assumed by the story in the Kathā Sarit Sāgara [55] is almost identical

with that in the Kah-gyur. The end, however, is more savage in the

Indian than in the Tibetan variant. After the ungratefulness of the

wife had been exposed, the king’s ministers “cut off her nose and ears

and branded her, and banished her from the country with the maimed man.

And in this matter Fate showed a becoming combination, for it united a

woman without nose and ears with a man without hands and feet.” In the

“Three Snake Leaves” (Grimm, No. 16), a wife who has been resuscitated

after her death by her husband conspires against him with a

ship-captain and has him flung into the sea. He is saved, however, and

she and her accomplice are ultimately discovered and sentenced to be

drowned.

The story of “The Grateful Animals and the Ungrateful Man” (No. 26) is

one that is very widely spread throughout Asia, and has made its way

into many parts of Europe. The merits of the lower animals were, in

Eastern stories, frequently contrasted with the demerits of man, so far

at least as gratitude is concerned, many centuries before such ideas as

have in modern times led to the formation of societies for the

protection of animals had exercised any influence over European

thought. In the present instance a hunter, who draws out of a pit a

lion, a snake, a mouse, a falcon, and a man, is rewarded by the two

beasts, the bird, and the reptile, and by their aid is enabled to

escape from prison, after having been thrown into it in consequence of

the machinations of the man he had saved. In the “Panchatantra”

(Appendix to Book i. story 2) a Brahman rescues a tiger, a monkey, a

snake, and a man, with similar results. From the work of which the

“Panchatantra” is the Sanskrit representative, the story made its way,

about 750 A.D., into the Syriac “Kalilag and Damnag,” and the Arabic

“Kalilah and Dimnah,” and thence, about 1080 A.D., into Symeon Seth’s

Greek translation from the Arabic, and the Latin translation (through

the Hebrew) by Joannes of Capua in the second half of the thirteenth

century, and so into the Spanish, German, French, Italian, and English

translations of different versions of the Arabic work. [56] It occurs

also in other works of Buddhistic origin. In a story from the

Rasavāhinī, quoted by Spiegel in his “Anecdota Pālica,” an inhabitant

of Benares rescues from a hole a dog, a snake, and a man. The dog and

the snake are grateful, and by their means their rescuer is enabled to

escape the impalement to which he had been condemned in consequence of

the malice of the ungrateful man he had rescued along with them. There

can be little doubt that it was from Indian, and probably Buddhistic,

sources that such grateful animals made their way into European

folk-tales—as the ants, fish, and birds of the “White Snake” (Grimm,

No. 17); the lions, bears, wolves, foxes, and hares of “The Two

Brothers” (No. 60); the ants, ducks, and bees of “The Queen Bee” (No.

62); the horse, ducks, stork, and bees of “The Two Wanderers” (No.

107); and the bear, mouse, and monkey of “The Faithful Beasts” (Grimm,

104 of first edition, afterwards omitted); not to speak of the

numberless counterparts of these grateful creatures in the folk-tales

of every European land.

Of the rest of the stories, the greater part belong to the class of

animal fables. Many of them are old acquaintances under a new guise.

“The Ungrateful Lion” (No. 27), for instance, which tells how a

woodpecker extracted a bone from a lion’s throat, and was supposed by

the lion to be sufficiently paid for his trouble by its escape from his

jaws, closely resembles the fable of the wolf which paid in similar

coin its long-billed benefactor. “The Wolf and the Sheep” (No. 29) is

the familiar fable of “The Wolf and the Lamb,” but the final argument

of the wolf is different. The story of the ass which insists upon

singing at the wrong time, and so is caught trespassing, and is

punished (No. 32), has made its mark in European literature. The jackal

which acts as arbiter between the two otters (No. 34), and takes as its

share the main part of the fish they catch, leaving only the head and

tail for them, closely resembles the well-known legal eater of the

disputed oyster and presenter of the oyster-shells to the two claimants

who had referred their dispute to his decision. The moral of the tale

in which the lion is saved by the jackal (No. 35) is the same as that

of the fable of the netted lion which the mouse rescued by gnawing its

bonds. The blue-stained jackal (No. 36) is one of the disguised animals

about which many fables are current in the West, such as the ass in the

lion’s hide, or the cat which fell into a shoemaker’s tub, and

afterwards played the part of a nun. And the monkeys which see the

reflection of the moon in a well, and think that it has fallen out of

the sky into the water, and form themselves into a chain whereby to

draw it out (No. 45), are closely related to the foolish persons of the

Wise Men of Gotham class, to whom various similar follies are

attributed in many lands.