3. Pearls. Arrianus (Ind. viii. 8) quotes from Megasthenes, a legend
in which the discovery of pearls is ascribed to Crishna. The passage
further implies that the Greek name margar'ithc was received from
an Indian name, which may be the case through the Dekhan dialect,
though there is nothing like it in Sanskrit, unless it be traced from
markarâ, a hollow vessel. The Sanskrit word for pearls is muktá,
"dropt" or "set free," "dropt by the rain-clouds." (See Lassen,
Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 244 n. 1. See also note 4, Tale XIV.) How
the Preserver of mother-o'-pearl shells comes to live up a river,
I know not, unless in his royal character he was supposed to have
an outlying country-villa. However Megasthenes (quoted by Lassen,
ii. 680, n. 2) tells us not only that there were many crocodiles and
alligators in the Indus, but also that many fishes and molluscs came
up the stream out of the sea as far as the confluence of the Akesines,
and small ones as far as the mountains. Onesikritos mentions the same
concerning other rivers.
4. The serpent-gods are spoken of sometimes as if they were supposed to
wear a human form and as often as in their reptile form. In the present
place in the text there is a strange confusion between the two ideas,
the "son" whom the White Serpent king comes to seek evidently wore
a reptile form, as when he was in the owl's mouth he resembled the
Tamer's girdle, yet the king himself and his companion are said to
be riding on horses; as it is also said they come out of the water
it was probably a crocodile that the story-teller had in his mind's
eye, and which might fancifully be conceived to be a serpent riding on
horseback, as a centaur represents a man on horseback. The serpent-gods
generally would seem to be more properly termed reptile-gods, as
not only ophidians and saurians seem to belong to their empire, but
batrachians also; in this very story the gold frog is reckoned the
actual daughter of the White Serpent-king, probably even emydians also,
though I do not recall an example. Water-snakes, however, are common in
Asia, and there is also there a group of batrachians called cæliciæ,
which are cylindrical in form, without feet and moving like serpents,
and considered to form a link between that family and their own. I do
not know if this in any way explains the symbolism whereby a creature
that had any right to be reckoned a frog could be called the daughter
of a serpent-king.
When the stories of encounters of heroes with huge malevolent
serpents, or crocodiles, passed into the mythology of Europe, these
were generally replaced by "dragons," or monsters, such as "Grendel"
in our Anglo-Saxon "Lay of Beowulf." There are some, however, in which
a bonâ fide serpent figures. In parts of Tirol, a white serpent is
spoken of as a "serpent-queen" and as more dangerous than the others;
various are the legends in which the release of a spell-bound princess
depends on the deliverer suffering himself to be three times encircled,
and the third time, kissed by a serpent; the trial frequently fails
at the third attempt. Sir Lancelot, if I remember right, accomplished
it in the end.
Every collection of mediæval legends contains stories of combats with
dragons, the groundwork probably brought from the East, and the detail
made to fit the hero of some local deliverance; the mythology of Tirol
is particularly rich in this class, almost every valley has its own;
at Wilten, near Innsbruck, the sting of a dragon is shown as of that
killed by the Christian giant Haymon; the one I have given in "Zovanin
senza paura," from the Italian Tirol (p. 348, "Household Stories
from the Land of Hofer"), has this similarity with Tales II. and V.,
that it is actually the water supply of the infested district which
is stopped by the dragon. There is this great difference, however,
between the Eastern and later Western versions of serpent myths. The
Indians having deified the serpent, their heroic tales have no further
aim than that of propitiating him. On the other hand, it was not long
before the religious influence under which the Christian myths were
moulded had connected and by degrees identified the serpent-exterior,
under the parable of which they set forth their local plague, with
that under which the adversary of souls is named in the sacred story
of the garden of Eden; and thus it became a necessity of the case
that the Christian hero should destroy or at least vanquish it.
Though the Indian serpent-gods seem to have been generally feared and
hated, we have instances--and that even in this little volume--of their
harmlessness also and even beneficence. An innocuous and benevolent
phase of dragon-character seems to have been adopted also in the early
heathen mythology of Europe. Nork (Mythologie der Volkssagen) tells
us the dragon was held sacred to Wodin, and its image was placed over
houses, town-gates, and towers, as a talisman against evil influences;
and I have met with a popular superstition lingering yet in Tirol that
to meet a crested adder (the European representative, I believe, of
the Cobra di capello, which is, as we have seen, the species specially
worshipped in India) brings good luck. I have said I do not remember
an instance in Indian mythology in which any member of the emydian
family comes under the empire of the serpent-god; I should expect
there are such instances, however, as the counterpart exists in Tirol,
where there are stories of mysterious fascination exercised by sacred
shrines upon the little land-tortoises and which have in consequence
been regarded by the peasantry as representing wandering souls waiting
for the completion of their purgatorial penance. See also concerning
the serpent-gods, note 1 to Tale II.
5. Mirjalaktschi. Jülg says, "Fettmacher" (fat-maker) is the best
equivalent he can give, but he is not convinced of its correctness,
and then exposes what he understands by "Fettmacher" by two German
expressions, one, meaning "pot-bellied," and the other not renderable
in English to ears polite. It would seem more in accordance with the
use of the name in the text to understand his own word Fettmacher,
as "he giving abundance," "he making fat."
6. Gambudvîpa. I have already (page viii.) had occasion to explain
this native name of India; otherwise spelt Dschambudvîpa and Jambudvîpa
and Jambudîpa. But as I only there spoke of the actual species of the
gambu-tree, one of the indigenous productions of India, I ought further
to mention that the name is rather derived from a fabulous specimen
of it, supposed to grow on the sacred mountain of Meru. Spence Hardy
("Legends and Theories of the Buddhists," p. 95) quotes the following
description of it from one of the late commentaries of the Sutras:
"From the root to the highest part is a thousand miles; the space
covered by its outspreading branches is three thousand miles in
circumference. The trunk is one hundred and fifty miles round, and five
hundred miles in height from the root to the place where the branches
begin to extend; the four great branches of it are each five hundred
miles long, and from between these flow four great rivers. Where the
fruit of the tree falls, small plants of gold arise which are washed
into one of the rivers." Earlier descriptions are less exaggerated;
details remaining in this one suggest that it has not been invented
without aid from some lingering remnant of an early tradition of the
Tree of Life and the four rivers of Paradise, "the gold of" one of
which "is good."
The great continent of India being called an island is explained in a
parable from the Jinâlankâra, given at p. 87 of the same work, likening
the outer Sakwala ridge or boundary of the universe to the rim of a
jar or vessel; the vessel filled with sauce representing the ocean
and the continents, like masses of cooked rice floating in the same.
At p. 82, he quotes from the first-mentioned commentary a description
of the mountain of Méru itself, illustrative of the habitual
exaggeration of the Indian sacred writers. "Between Maha Méru and
the Sakwala ridge are seven circles of rocks with seven seas between
them. They are circular because of the shape of Maha Méru. The first or
innermost, Yugandhara, is 210,000 miles broad; its inner circumference
is 7,560,000 miles, and its outer, 8,220,000 miles; from Maha Méru
to Yugandhara is 840,000 miles. Near Maha Méru, the depth of the sea
is 840,000 miles, &c.," the seven circles being all described with
analogous dimensions. Also p. 42, "Buddha knows how many atoms there
are in Maha Méru, although it is a million miles in height."