Indian Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs [universal ebook reader .txt] 📗

A few days afterwards there was a great purchase of fish which came to the rich man’s kitchen. How the Crow longed for some! So there he lay, from early morn, groaning and making a great noise. Says the Pigeon to the Crow:

“Come, Sir Crow, and get your breakfast!”

“Oh dear! oh dear! I have such a fit of indigestion!” says he.

“Nonsense! Crows never have indigestion,” said the Pigeon. “If you eat a lamp-wick, that stays in your stomach a little while; but anything else is digested in a trice, as soon as you eat it. Now do what I tell you; don’t behave in this way just for seeing a little fish.”

“Why do you say that, master? I have indigestion.”

“Well, be careful,” said the Pigeon, and flew away.

The cook prepared all the dishes, and then stood at the kitchen door, wiping the sweat off his body. “Now’s my time!” thought Mr. Crow, and alighted on a dish containing some dainty food. Click! The cook heard it, and looked round. Ah! he caught the Crow, and plucked all the feathers out of his head, all but one tuft; he powdered ginger and cummin, mixed it up with buttermilk, and rubbed it well all over the bird’s body.

“That’s for spoiling my master’s dinner and making me throw it away!” said he, and threw him into his basket. Oh, how it hurt!

By-and-by the Pigeon came in, and saw the Crow lying there, making a great noise. He made great game of him, and repeated a verse of poetry:

“Who is this tufted crane I see
Lying where he’s no right to be?
Come out! my friend, the crow is near,
And he may do you harm, I fear!”

To this the Crow answered with another:

“No tufted crane am I⁠—no, no!
I’m nothing but a greedy crow.
I would not do as I was told,
So now I’m plucked, as you behold.”

And the Pigeon rejoined with a third verse:

“You’ll come to grief again, I know⁠—
It is your nature to do so;
If people make a dish of meat,
’Tis not for little birds to eat.”

Then the Pigeon flew away, saying: “I can’t live with this creature any longer.” And the Crow lay there groaning till he died.

The story literature of India is in a large measure the outcome of the moral revolution of the peninsula connected with the name of Gautama Buddha. As the influence of his life and doctrines grew, a tendency arose to connect all the popular stories of India round the great teacher. This could be easily effected owing to the wide spread of the belief in metempsychosis. All that was told of the sages of the past could be interpreted of the Buddha by representing them as pre-incarnations of him. Even with Fables, or beast-tales, this could be done, for the Hindus were Darwinists long before Darwin, and regarded beasts as cousins of men and stages of development in the progress of the soul through the ages. Thus, by identifying the Buddha with the heroes of all folktales and the chief characters in the beast-drolls, the Buddhists were enabled to incorporate the whole of the story-store of Hindostan in their sacred books, and enlist on their side the tale-telling instincts of men.

In making Buddha the centre figure of the popular literature of India, his followers also invented the Frame as a method of literary art. The idea of connecting a number of disconnected stories familiar to us from The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decamerone, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or even Pickwick, is directly traceable to the plan of making Buddha the central figure of India folk-literature. Curiously enough, the earliest instance of this in Buddhist literature was intended to be a Decameron, ten tales of Buddha’s previous births, told of each of the ten Perfections. Asvagosha, the earlier Boccaccio, died when he had completed thirty-four of the Birth-Tales. But other collections were made, and at last a corpus of the Jatakas, or Birth-Tales of the Buddha, was carried over to Ceylon, possibly as early as the first introduction of Buddhism, 241 BC. There they have remained till the present day, and have at last been made accessible in a complete edition in the original Pali by Prof. Fausböll.

These Jatakas, as we now have them, are enshrined in a commentary on the gathas, or moral verses, written in Ceylon by one of Buddhaghosa’s school in the fifth century AD. They invariably begin with a “Story of the Present,” an incident in Buddha’s life which calls up to him a “Story of the Past,” a folktale in which he had played a part during one of his former incarnations. Thus the fable of the Lion and the Crane, which opens the present collection, is introduced by a “Story of the Present” in the following words:⁠—

“A service have we done thee” [the opening words of the gatha or moral verse]. “This the Master told while living at Jetavana concerning Devadatta’s treachery. Not only now, O Bhickkus, but in a former existence was Devadatta ungrateful. And having said this he told a tale.” Then follows the tale as given above (pp. 1, 2), and the commentary concludes: “The Master, having given the lesson, summed up the Jataka thus: ‘At that time, the Lion was Devadatta, and the Crane was I myself.’ ” Similarly, with each story of the past the Buddha identifies himself, or is mentioned as identical with, the virtuous hero of the folktale. These Jatakas are 550 in number, and have been reckoned to include some 2000 tales. Some of these had been translated by Mr. Rhys-Davids (Buddhist Birth Stories, I, Trübner’s Oriental Library, 1880), Prof. Fausböll (“Five Jātakas,” Copenhagen), and Dr. R. Morris (Folklore Journal, vols. II⁠–⁠V). A few exist sculptured on the earliest Buddhist Stupas. Thus several of the circular figure designs on the reliefs from Amaravati, now on the grand staircase of the British Museum, represent Jatakas,