According to Abbé Huc’s spelling, Hormoustha.
Tale IV.
[1.] Here is one of the numerous instances where the Mongolian tale-repeater introduces into the Indian story details drawn to the life from the manners and customs around him of his own people. Compare with it the following sketch from personal observation in Mongolia, given in Abbé Huc’s “Travels:”—“You sometimes come upon a plain covered with animation; tents and herds dotted all over it.... It is a place whither the greater supply of water and the choicer pastures have attracted for a time a number of nomadic families; you see rising in all directions tents of various dimensions, looking like balloons newly inflated and just about to take flight; children with a sort of hod upon their backs run about collecting argols (dried dung for fuel), which they pile up in heaps round their respective tents. The women look after the calves, make tea in the open air, or prepare milk in various ways; the men, mounted on fiery horses, armed with a long pole, gallop about, guiding to the best pastures the great herds of cattle which undulate over the surrounding country like waves of the sea. All of a sudden these pictures, anon so full of animation, disappear. Men, tents, herds, all have vanished in the twinkling of an eye. You see nothing left behind but deserted heaps of embers, half-extinguished fires, and a few bones of which birds of prey are disputing the possession. Such are the sole vestiges that a Mongol tribe has just passed that way. The animals having devoured all the grass around, the chief gives the signal for departure, and all the herdsmen, folding their tents, drive their herds before them, no matter whither, in search of fresh pastures.”
This nomadic life, characteristic of the Mongols, would seem never at any time to have entered into Indian manners and customs. Though in early times pastoral occupations so engrossed them that they have left deep traces in their language (e. g. gotra, meaning originally a breed of cows, came to stand for a family lineage; and gôpa, gôpala, originally a cowherd, for a prince), and the hymns of the Rig-Vêda are full of invocations of blessings on the herds (Rig V. 1. 42, 8. 67, 3. 118, 2); yet wherever they came they occupied themselves with agriculture also, and settled themselves down with social habits which early led to the foundation of cities. Consult Lassen, i. 494, 685, 815, &c.
[2.] Abbé Huc incidentally mentions also this practice of carrying the produce of the flocks and herds stored in sheep’s paunches, as the present common usage of the Mongolians, and adopted by himself among the provisions for his journeyings among them (vol. ii. chap. iii., and other places).
[3.] Marmot. The sandy plains of Tibet are frequently inhabited by marmots, who live together in holes, and whose fur is at the present day an important article of the Tibetian trade both with India and China. It is now generally allowed that it must be these beasts which were intended in the marvellous accounts of the old Greek writers of the gold-digging ants. Though the Indians themselves gave them the name of ants, pipîlika (e. g. Mahâ Bhârata, i. p. 375, v. 1860), the description of them would pass exactly for that of this little animal—in size somewhat smaller than a fox, covered with fur, in habits social, living in holes underground in the winter.
[4.] See [note 3] to “The False Friend.”
[5.] The number five is a favourite number in Buddhistic teaching, ritual and ceremonies. (Wassiljew, quoted by Jülg.) To Bodhidsarma, the last Indian patriarch, on his removal to China, is ascribed this sentence: “I came to this country to make known the law and to free men from their passions. Every blossom that brings forth fruit hath five petals, and thus have I fulfilled my undertaking.” (Abel Remusat, Mel. As. p. 125.) One of Buddha, or at least, Âdi-Buddha’s titles, particularly in Tibet, is Pankagnânâtmaka, or “him possessed of five kinds of gnâna” or knowledge (Notices of the Religion of the Bouddhas, by B. Hodgson), and this formed the basis of the complicated system of the later Buddhists.
The Brahmans, too, had five sacred observances which they aimed at exercising; the study of their sacred books, to offer sacrifice to the manes, the gods and all creatures, hospitality, and thereby increase as well their own virtue and renown as that of their fathers and mothers. The five necessary things are clothes, food, drink, coverlets for sleeping, and medicine.