Story of Hiraṇyáksha and Mṛigánkalekhá.
There is in the lap of the Himálayas a country called Kaśmíra, which is the very crest-jewel of the earth, the home of sciences and virtue. In it there was a town, named Hiraṇyapura, and there reigned in it a king, named Kanakáksha. And there was born to that king, owing to his having propitiated Śiva, a son, named Hiraṇyáksha, by his wife Ratnaprabhá. The prince was one day playing at ball, and he purposely managed to strike with the ball a female ascetic who came that way. That female ascetic possessing supernatural powers, who had overcome the passion of anger, laughed and said to Hiraṇyáksha, without altering the expression of her face,[11] “If your youth and other qualities make you so insolent, what will you become if you obtain Mṛigánkalekhá for a wife.”[12] When the prince heard that, he propitiated the female ascetic and said to her; “Who is this Mṛigánkalekhá? tell me, reverend madam.” Then she said to him, “There is a glorious king of the Vidyádharas on the Himálayas, named Śaśitejas. He has a beautiful daughter, named Mṛigánkalekhá, whose loveliness keeps the princes of the Vidyádharas awake at night. And she will be a fitting wife for you, and you will be a suitable husband for her.” When the female ascetic, who possessed supernatural power, said this to Hiraṇyáksha, he replied, “Tell me, reverend mother, how she is to be obtained.” Thereupon she said, “I will go and find out how she is affected towards you, by talking about you. And then I will come and take you there. And you will find me to-morrow in the temple of the god here, named Amareśa, for I come here every day to worship him.” After the female ascetic had said this, she went through the air by her supernatural power to the Himálayas, to visit that Mṛigánkalekhá. Then she praised to her so artfully the good qualities of Hiraṇyáksha, that the celestial maiden became very much in love with him, and said to her, “If, reverend mother, I cannot manage to obtain a husband of this kind, of what use to me is this my purposeless life?” So the emotion of love was produced in Mṛigánkalekhá, and she spent the day in talking about him, and passed the night with that female ascetic. In the meanwhile Hiraṇyáksha spent the day in thinking of her, and with difficulty slept at night, but towards the end of the night Párvatí said to him in a dream, “Thou art a Vidyádhara, become a mortal by the curse of a hermit, and thou shalt be delivered from it by the touch of the hand of this female ascetic, and then thou shalt quickly marry this Mṛigánkalekhá. Do not be anxious about it, for she was thy wife in a former state.” Having said this, the goddess disappeared from his sight. And in the morning the prince woke and rose up, and performed the auspicious ceremonies of bathing and so on. Then he went and adored Amareśa and stood in his presence, since it was there that the female ascetic had appointed him a rendezvous.
In the meanwhile Mṛigánkalekhá fell asleep with difficulty in her own palace, and Párvatí said to her in a dream, “Do not grieve, the curse of Hiraṇyáksha is at an end, and he will again become a Vidyádhara by the touch of the hand of the female ascetic, and thou shalt have him once more for a husband.” When the goddess had said this, she disappeared, and in the morning Mṛigánkalekhá woke up and told the female ascetic her dream. And the holy ascetic returned to the earth, and said to Hiraṇyáksha, who was in the temenos of Amareśa, “Come to the world of Vidyádharas.” When she said this, he bent before her, and she took him up in her arms, and flew up with him to heaven. Then Hiraṇyáksha’s curse came to an end, and he became a prince of the Vidyádharas, and he remembered his former birth, and said to the female ascetic, “Know that I was a king of the Vidyádharas named Amṛitatejas in a city named Vajrakúṭa. And long ago I was cursed by a hermit, angry because I had treated him with neglect, and I was doomed to live in the world of mortals until touched by your hand. And my wife, who then abandoned the body because I had been cursed, has now been born again as Mṛigánkalekhá, and so has before been loved by me. And now I will go with you and obtain her once more, for I have been purified by the touch of your hand, and my curse is at an end.” So said Amṛitatejas, the Vidyádhara prince, as he travelled through the air with that female ascetic to the Himálayas. There he saw Mṛigánkalekhá in a garden, and she saw him coming, as he had been described by the female ascetic. Wonderful to say, these lovers first entered one another’s minds by the ears, and now they entered them by the eyes, without ever having gone out again.
Then that outspoken female ascetic said to Mṛigánkalekhá, “Tell this to your father with a view to your marriage.” She instantly went, with a face downcast from modesty, and informed her father of all through her confidante. And it happened that her father also had been told how to act by Párvatí in a dream, so he received Amṛitatejas into his palace with all due honour. And he bestowed Mṛigánkalekhá on him with the prescribed ceremonies, and after he was married, he went to the city of Vajrakúṭa. There he got back his kingdom as well as his wife, and he had his father Kanakáksha brought there, by means of the holy female ascetic, as he was a mortal, and he gratified him with heavenly enjoyments and sent him back again to earth, and long enjoyed his prosperity with Mṛigánkalekhá.
“So you see that the destiny fixed for any creature in this world, by works in a former birth, falls as it were before his feet, and he attains it with ease, though apparently unattainable.” When Naraváhanadatta heard this tale of Gomukha’s, he was enabled to sleep that night, though pining for Śaktiyaśas.
[1] This story is identical with the 5th in the 4th book of the Panchatantra in Benfey’s translation, which he considers Buddhistic, and with which he compares the story of the Bhilla in chapter 61 of this work. He compares the story of Dhúminí in the Daśakumára Charita, page 150, Wilson’s edition, which resembles this story more nearly even than the form in the Panchatantra. Also a story in Ardschi Bordschi, translated by himself in Ausland 1858, No. 36, pages 845, 846. (It will be found on page 305 of Sagas from the Far East.) He quotes a saying of Buddha from Spence Hardy’s Eastern Monachism, page 166, cp. Köppen, Religion des Buddha, p. 374. This story is also found in the Forty Vazírs, a collection of Persian tales, (Behrnauer’s translation, Leipzig, 1851, page 325.) It is also found in the Gesta Romanorum, c. 56. (But the resemblance is not very striking.) Cp. also Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen, No. 16. (Benfey’s Panchatantra, Vol. I, pp. 436 and ff.) This story is simply the Cullapadumajátaka, No. 193 in Fausböll’s edition. See also Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, Introduction, pp. lxi–lxiii.
[2] In La Fontaine’s Fables X, 14, a man gains a kingdom by carrying an elephant.
[3] In the story of Satyamanjarí, a tale extracted by Professor Nilmani Mookerjee from the Kathá Kośa, a collection of Jaina stories, the heroine carries her leprous husband on her back.
[4] This story is found, with the substitution of a man for a woman, on p. 128 of Benfey’s Panchatantra, Vol. 11; he tells us that it is also found in the 17th chapter of Silvestre de Sacy’s Kalila o Dimna (Wolff’s Translation II, 99; Knatchbull, 346,) in the 11th section of Symeon Seth’s Greek version, 14th chapter of John of Capua; German translation Ulm, 1483 Y., 5; Anvár-i-Suhaili, p. 596 Cabinet des Fées, XVIII, 189. It is imitated by Baldo, 18th fable, (Poesics Inédites du Moyen Age by Edéléstand du Méril, p. 244.) Benfey pronounces it Buddhistic in origin, though apparently not acquainted with its form in the Kathá Sarit Ságara. Cp. Rasaváhini, chap. 3. (Spiegel’s Anecdota Paliea). It is also found in the Karma Śataka. Cp. also Matthæus Paris, Hist. Maj. London, 1571, pp. 240–242, where it is told of Richard Cœur de Lion; Gesta Romanorum, c. 119; Gower, Confessio Amantis, Book V; E. Meier Schwäbische Volksmärchen. (Benfey’s Panchatantra, Vol. I, p. 192 and ff.) Cp. also for the gratitude of the animals the IVth story in Campbell’s Tales of the West Highlands. The animals are a dog, an otter and a falcon, p. 74 and ff. The Mongolian form of the story is to be found in Sagas from the Far East, Tale XIII. See also the XIIth and XXIInd of Miss Stokes’s Indian Fairy Tales. There is a striking illustration of the gratitude of animals in Grimm’s No. 62, and in Bartsch’s Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, Vol. I, p. 483. De Gubernatis in a note to p. 129 of Vol. II, of his Zoological Mythology, mentions a story of grateful animals in Afanassief. The hero finds some wolves fighting for a bone, some bees fighting for honey, and some shrimps fighting for a carcase; he makes a just division, and the grateful wolves, bees, and shrimps help him in need. See also p. 157 of the same volume. No. 25 in the Pentamerone of Basile belongs to the same cycle.
See Die dankbaren Thiere in Gaal’s Märchen der Magyaren, p. 175, and Der Rothe Hund, p. 339. In the Saccamkirajatátaka No. 73, Fausböll, Vol. I, 323, a hermit saves a prince, a rat, a parrot and a snake. The rat and snake are willing to give treasures, the parrot rice, but the prince orders his benefactor’s execution, and is then killed by his own subjects. See Bernhard Schmidt’s Griechische Märchen, p. 3, note. See also Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, Introduction, pp. lxiii–lxv.
[5] In Giles’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, a tiger, who has killed the son of an old woman, feeds her henceforth, and appears as a mourner at her funeral. The story in the text bears a faint resemblance to that of Androclus, (Aulus Gellius. V, 14). See also Liebrecht’s Dunlop, p. 111, with the note at the end of the Volume.
[6] Cp. Gijjhajátaka, Fausböll, Vol. II, p. 51.
[7] Cp. the 46th story in Sicilianische Märchen gesammelt von Laura von Gonzenbach, where a snake coils round the throat of a king, and will not let him go, till he promises to marry a girl, whom he had violated. See also Benfey’s Panchatantra, Vol. I, p. 523.
[8] The Petersburg lexicographers explain ṭakka as Geizhals, Filz; but say that the word ṭhaka in Marathi means a rogue, cheat. The word kadarya also means niggardly, miserly. General Cunningham (Ancient Geography of India, p. 152) says that the Ṭakkas were once the undisputed lords of the Panjáb, and still subsist as a numerous agricultural race in the lower hills between the Jhelum and the Rávi.
[9] So in the Russian story of “The Miser,” (Ralston’s Russian Folk-tales, p. 47.) Marko the Rich says to his wife, in order to avoid the payment of a copeck; “Harkye wife! I’ll strip myself naked, and lie down under the holy pictures. Cover me up with a cloth, and sit down and cry, just as you would over a corpse. When the moujik comes for his money, tell him I died this morning.” Ralston conjectures that the story came originally from the East.
[10] This resembles the conclusion of the story of the turtle Kambugríva and the swans Vikaṭa and Sankaṭa, Book X, chap. 60, śl. 169, see also Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, p. 292. A similar story is told in Bartsch’s Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg, Vol. I, p. 349, of the people of Teterow. They adopted the same manœuvre to get a stone out of a well. The man at the top then let go, in order to spit on his hands.
[11] I follow Dr. Kern’s conjecture avikṛitânanâ.
[12] In the Sicilianische Märchen, No. 14, a prince throws a stone at an old woman’s pitcher and breaks it. She exclaims in her anger, “May you wander through the world until you find the beautiful Nzentola!” Nos. 12 and 13 begin in a similar way. A parallel will be found in Dr. Köhler’s notes to No. 12. He compares the commencement of the Pentamerone of Basile.