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.