Sagas from the Far East Part 35

Sin reglas del arte It may happen some once, thus Borriquitos hay Although they can't write, Que una vez aciertan Human a.s.ses may hit off Por casualidad! By accident quite!

2. The woman invents a name to frighten, and also as a trap for, her husband. "Surja, is Sanskrit, and Bagatur, Mongolian for a 'Hero.' Such combinations are not infrequent." (Julg.)

"Shura means a Hero in Sanscrit, agreeing not only in sense with the Greek word , but also in derivation; thus revealing a primeval agreement in the estimation in which hero-nature was held. It is more properly written Sura, because it comes from Svar, heaven, and means literally 'heavenly.' It is used in that form as an appellation of the Sun. Heroes are so called, because when they fell in battle, Svarga, the heaven of deified kings, was given them for their dwelling-place. 'Indra shall give to those who fall in battle the world where all wishes are fulfilled, for their portion. Neither by sacrifices, nor offerings to the Brahmans, nor by contemplation, nor knowledge can mortals attain to Svarga as securely as do heroes falling in battle.' Maha Bharata, xi. 2, v. 60." (La.s.sen, i. 69.)

3. "The women of Tibet are not indeed taught the use of the bow and the matchlock, but in riding they are as expert and fearless as the men, yet it is only on occasion that they mount a horse, such as when travelling; or when there chances to be no man about the place to look after a stray animal." (Abbe Huc's "Travels in China and Tibet,"

vol. i. ch. iii.)

4. A very similar story may be found in Barbazan's, "Fabliaux et Contes des Poetes Francais des XI-XV Siecles," in 4 vols., Paris 1808, vol. iv. pp. 287-295. (Julg.)

TALE XVIII.

1. Shanggasba is possibly a Tibetian word, bsang, grags, pa = "of good fame," but more probably it is compounded from the Mongolian sSang, "treasure." (Julg.)

2. Garuda: see note 2, Tale I. The allusion in this place is to an image of him over a shrine.

3. Silk was cultivated in India at a very early date, probably much earlier than any records that remain to us can show; there are twelve indigenous species of silkworm. That of China was not introduced into India before the year 419 of our era (Ritter, vol. vi. pt. 1, 698). The indigenous silkworms fed upon other trees besides the mulberry and notably on the ficus religiosa. The Greeks would seem to have learnt the use of silk from the Indians, or at least from the Persians. Nearchos is the first Greek writer in whom mention of it is found; he describes it as like the finest weft of cotton-stuff, and says it was made from fibre sc.r.a.ped from the bark of a tree; an error in which he was followed by other writers; others again wrote that the fibres were combed off the leaf of a tree; yet Pausanias had mentioned the worm as the intermediary of its production (C. Muller, Pref. to his Edition of Strabo, and notes). The Romans also carried on a considerable trade in silk with India, and Pliny, vi. 20, 2, mentions one kind of Indian silk texture that was so fine and light, you could see through it, "ut in publico matrona transluceat." Horace also alludes to the same, Sat. i. 2, 101. Pliny also complains of the luxury whereby this costly stuff was used, not only for dresses, but for coverings of cus.h.i.+ons. [68] Vopiscus, in his life of the Emperor Aurelian, tells us that at that time a pound weight of silk was worth a pound weight of gold. In India itself the luxurious use of silk has restrictions put upon it in the Manu. It was also prescribed that when men devoted themselves to the hermit life in the jungle, they should lay aside their silken clothing; and we find Rama (Ramajana, ii. 37, 14) putting on a penitential habit over his silken robe. The Maha Bharata (ii. cap. 50) contains a pa.s.sage in which among the objects brought in tribute to Judhishthira is kitaga, or the "insect-product,"

a word used to designate both silk and cochineal.

4. A similar episode occurs in a tale collected in the neighbourhood of Schwaz in North Tirol which I have given under the name of "Prince Radpot" in "Household Stories from the Land of Hofer." The rest of the story recalls that called "The three Black Dogs" in the same collection, but there is much more grace and pathos about the Tirolean version.

TALE XIX.

1. See note 2, Tale XVII.

2. The fox plays a similar part in many an Eastern fable. The first book of the Pantscha Tantra Collection is ent.i.tled Mitrabheda, or the Art of Mischief-making. A lion-king who has two foxes for his ministers falls into great alarm one day, because he hears for the first time in his life the roaring of an ox, which some merchants had left behind them because it was lame and sick. The lion consults his two ministers in this strait, and the two while laughing at his fears determine to entertain them in order to enhance their own usefulness. First they visit the ox and make sure he is quite infirm and harmless, and then they go to the lion, and tell him it is the terrible Ox-king, the bearer of s.h.i.+va, and that s.h.i.+va has sent him down into that forest to devour all the animals in it small and great. The lion is not surprised to hear his fears confirmed and entreats his ministers to find him a way out of the difficulty. The foxes pretend to undertake the negotiation and then go back to the ox and tell him it is the command of the king that he quit the forest. The ox pleads his age and infirmities and desolate condition, and the foxes having made him believe in the value of their services as intermediaries bring him to the lion. Both parties are immensely grateful to the ministers for having as each thinks softened the heart of the other, but the foxes begin to see they have taken a false step in bringing the ox to the lion, as they become such fast friends, that there is danger of their companions.h.i.+p being no longer sought by their master. They determine, therefore, the ox must be killed; but how are they to kill so disproportioned a victim? They must make the lion do the execution himself. But how? they are such sworn friends. They find the lion alone and fill his mind with alarm, a.s.sure him the ox is plotting to kill him. They hardly gain credit, but the lion promises to be on his guard; while they are on the watch also for any accident which may give colour to their design. Meantime, they keep up each other's courage by the narration of fables showing how by perseverance in cunning any perfidy may be accomplished. At last it happens one day that a frightful storm comes on while the ox is out grazing. He comes galloping back to seek the cover of the forest, shaking his head and sides to get rid of the heavy raindrops, tearing up the ground with his heavy hoofs in his speed, and his tail stretched out wildly behind. "See!" say the foxes to the lion; "see if we were not right. Behold how he comes tramping along ready to devour thee; see how his eyes glisten with fury, see how he gnashes his teeth, see how he tears up the earth with his powerful hoofs!" The lion cannot remain unconvinced in presence of such evidence. "Now is your moment," cry the foxes; "be beforehand with him before he reaches you." Thus instigated the lion falls upon the ox. The ox surprised at this extraordinary reception, and already out of breath, is thrown upon the defensive, and in his efforts to save himself the lion sees the proof of his intention to attack. Accordingly he sets no bounds to his fury, and has soon torn him in pieces. The foxes get the benefit of a feast for many days on his flesh, besides being reinstated in the full empire over their master. In one of the fables, however, the tables are cleverly turned on Reynard by "the sagacity of the bearded goat." An old he-goat having remained behind on the mountains, one day, when the rest of the herd went home, found himself suddenly in presence of a lion. Remembering that a moment's hesitation would be his death, he a.s.sumed a bold countenance and walked straight up to the lion. The lion, astonished at this unwonted procedure, thinks it must be some very extraordinary beast; and instead of setting upon it, after his wont, speaks civilly to it, saying, "Thou of the long beard, whence art thou?" The goat answered, "I am a devout servant of s.h.i.+va to whom I have promised to make sacrifice of twenty-one tigers, twenty-five elephants, and ten lions; the tigers and the elephants have I already slain, and now I am seeking for ten lions to slay." The lion hearing this formidable declaration, without waiting for more, turned him and fled. As he ran he fell in with a fox, who asked him whither he ran so fast. The lion gives a ridiculous description of the goat, dictated by his terror; the fox recognizes that it is only a goat, and thinking to profit by the remains of his flesh perfidiously urges him to go back and slaughter him. He accordingly goes back with this intention, but the goat is equal to the occasion, and turning sharply upon the fox, exclaims, "Did I not send thee out to fetch me ten lions for the sacrifice? How then darest thou to appear before me having only snared me one?" The lion thinking his reproaches genuine, once more turns tail and makes good his escape. It has much similarity with the episode of the hare and the wolf in the next tale.

3. Svarga. See note 2, Tale XVII.

TALE XX.

1. Hiranjavati, "the gold-coloured river," also called Svarnavati, "the yellow river," both names occurring only in Buddhist writers: one of the northern tributaries of the Ganges, into which it falls not far from Patna, and the chief river of Nepaul. Its name was properly Gandakavati = "Rhinoceros-river," or simply Gan'da'ki, whence its modern name of the Goondook, as also that of Kondochates, into which it was transformed by the Greek geographers. In its upper course it often brings down ammonite petrifactions, which are believed to be incarnations or manifestations of Vishnu, hence it has a sacred character, and on its banks are numerous spots of pilgrimage.

2. Concerning such distributions of alms, see Koppen, i. 581 et seq.

3. The story affords no data on which to decide whether this cynical speech is supposed to be a serious utterance representing the actual motives on which the mendicant life was actually adopted under the teaching of Buddhism, affording a strong contrast from those which have prompted to it under Christianity, or whether it is intended as a satire on the Bhixu. (For Bhixu, see pp. 330, 332.)

4. I know not how the tufts of wool could have got caught off the sheeps' backs on to ant-heaps, unless it be that the marmots being as we have already seen (note 3, Tale IV.) called ants, the tale-repeater takes it for granted there are marmot-holes in Nepaul like those familiar to him in Mongolia, which Abbe Huc thus describes (vol. i. ch. ii.), "These animals construct over the opening of their little dens a sort of miniature dome composed of gra.s.s artistically twisted, designed as a shelter from wind and rain. These little heaps of dried gra.s.s are of the size and shape of mole-hills. Cold made us cruel, and we proceeded to level the house-domes of these poor little animals, which retreated into their holes below, as we approached. By means of this Vandalism we managed to collect a sackful of efficient fuel, and so warmed the water which was our only aliment that day."

5. "Though there is so much gold and silver there is great dest.i.tution in Tibet. At Lha-Ssa, for instance, the number of mendicants is enormous. They go from door to door soliciting a handful of tsamba (barley-meal), and enter any one's house without ceremony. The manner of asking alms is to hold out the closed hand with the thumb raised. We must add in commendation of the Tibetians that they are generally very kind and compa.s.sionate, rarely sending the mendicant away una.s.sisted." (Abbe Huc, vol. ii. ch. v.)

6. Indian tales often remind one of the frequent web of a dream in which one imagines oneself starting in pursuit of a particular object, but another and another fancy intervenes and the first purpose becomes altogether lost sight of. This was particularly observable in the tale ent.i.tled "How the Schimnu-Khan was slain," in which, after many times intending it, Ma.s.sang never goes back to thank his master at last. The present is a still more striking instance, in its consequence and repeated change of purport. In pursuing the mendicant's life, the search for the man's parents is forgotten; and the man and his wife are themselves lost sight of in the episode of the lamb.

7. Concerning the combination of the Moon and the hare, see Liebrecht, in Lazarus and Steinthal, Zeitschrift, vol. i. pt. 1. The Mongols see in the spots in the moon the figure of a hare, and imagine it was placed there in memory of Shakjamuni having once transformed himself into a hare out of self-sacrifice, that he might serve a hungry wayfarer for a meal. (Bergman, Nomadische Streifereien unter den Kalmuken, in 1802-3, quoted by Julg.)

8. See note 5, Tale III.

TALE XXI.

1. Compare this story with the "Wunderharfe" in the "Mahrchensaal"

of Kletke. (Julg.) Its similarity with the story of King Midas will strike every reader.

2. Chara Kitad = Black China; the term designates the north of China.

3. Daibang (in Chinese, Tai-ping = peace and happiness), the usual Mongolian designation for the Chinese Emperor. (Julg.)

4. See note 9, Tale IV.

TALE XXII.

1. Bagatur-Ssedkiltu, "of heroic capacity." (Julg.) See Note 2, Tale XVII.

2. The Three Precious Treasures, see note 3, Tale XVI.

3. Pearls. Arria.n.u.s (Ind. viii. 8) quotes from Megasthenes, a legend in which the discovery of pearls is ascribed to Crishna. The pa.s.sage 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 markara, a hollow vessel. The Sanskrit word for pearls is mukta, "dropt" or "set free," "dropt by the rain-clouds." (See La.s.sen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 244 n. 1. See also note 4, Tale XIV.) How the Preserver of mother-o'-pearl sh.e.l.ls 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 La.s.sen, 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-G.o.ds 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-G.o.ds generally would seem to be more properly termed reptile-G.o.ds, 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 caeliciae, 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, pa.s.sed 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 bona 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 mediaeval 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 cla.s.s, 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-G.o.ds 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 superst.i.tion 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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-G.o.d; 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-G.o.ds, note 1 to Tale II.

5. Mirjalaktschi. Julg 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. Gambudvipa. I have already (page viii.) had occasion to explain this native name of India; otherwise spelt Dschambudvipa and Jambudvipa and Jambudipa. 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 s.p.a.ce covered by its outspreading branches is three thousand miles in circ.u.mference. 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 Jinalankara, 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 ma.s.ses of cooked rice floating in the same.

At p. 82, he quotes from the first-mentioned commentary a description of the mountain of Meru itself, ill.u.s.trative of the habitual exaggeration of the Indian sacred writers. "Between Maha Meru and the Sakwala ridge are seven circles of rocks with seven seas between them. They are circular because of the shape of Maha Meru. The first or innermost, Yugandhara, is 210,000 miles broad; its inner circ.u.mference is 7,560,000 miles, and its outer, 8,220,000 miles; from Maha Meru to Yugandhara is 840,000 miles. Near Maha Meru, the depth of the sea is 840,000 miles, &c.," the seven circles being all described with a.n.a.logous dimensions. Also p. 42, "Buddha knows how many atoms there are in Maha Meru, although it is a million miles in height."

TALE XXIII.

1. "The five colours," see note 5, Tale IV.