Chapter IV: Introduction (3)

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.

TIBETAN TALES.