Tale XXII.
[1.] Bagatur-Ssedkiltu, “of heroic capacity.” (Jülg.) See [Note 2, Tale XVII].
[2.] The Three Precious Treasures, see note 3, Tale XVI.
[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 μαργαρίτης 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.”