[3.] Apes enter frequently not only into the fables but into the epic poetry of India. The Ramajana, narrating the spreading of the Aryan Indians over the south and far-east, speaks of the country as inhabited by apes, and of Rama taking apes for his allies; also, on one occasion, of his re-establishing an ape-king in possession of his previous dominions. Consult Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 534, 535. Megasthenes mentions various kinds of apes and monkeys, with, however, scarcely recognizable descriptions, in his enumeration of the wild animals of India (Fragm. x. p. 410). Kleitarchos tells that when Alexander had reached a hill in the neighbourhood of the Hydaspes, he came upon a tribe of apes arranged in battle array, looking so formidable that he was about to give the signal for attacking them, but was withheld by the representations of Taxiles, king of the neighbouring country of Taxila, who accompanied him (Fragm. xvi. p. 80). The Pantcha-Tantra contains a fable in which the King of Kamanapura establishes an ape for his bodyguard as more faithful and efficient than man; a thief, however, brings a serpent into the apartment, and at sight of the mortal enemy of his kind, the ape runs away. Another fable of the same collection tells of a Brahman who, having succeeded in rearing a flourishing garden of melons, found them all devoured as soon as ripe by a party of apes, nor was he able by any means to get rid of them. One day he laid himself down hid amid the leafage as if he had been dead, but with a stick in his hand ready to attack them when they approached. At first they indeed took him for dead and were venturing close up to him, when one of them espied the stick and cried to the others, “Dead men do not carry arms,” and with that they all escaped; and it was the same with every trap he laid for them, by their wariness they evaded them all.
[4.] The Indian world of story abounds in tales in which the low notion of expecting some advantage to accrue in this life is proposed as the object and reward of good actions. Instances will doubtless occur to the reader. The Pantcha-Tantra Collection contains one in which an elephant is caught by a Khan out hunting, by being driven into a deep dyke. He asks advice of a Brahman who passes that way, as to how he is to extricate himself. “Now is the time,” answers the Brahman, “to recall if you have ever done good to any one, and if so to call him to your aid.” The elephant thereupon recalls that he once delivered a number of rats whom a Khan had hunted and caught and shut up in earthen jars by lifting the earthen jars with his trunk and gently breaking them. He accordingly invokes the aid of these rats, who come and gnaw away at the earth surrounding the dyke, till they have made so easy a slope of it that the elephant can walk out.
Christianity fortunately proposes a higher motive for our good actions, and the experience of life would make that derived from results to be expected from gratitude a very poor one.
[5]. A story, with a precisely similar episode of the recovery of a jewel by ancillary beasts, comes into the legend of another ruin of the Italian Tirol.
[6.] See note 4 to “Vikramâditja’s Throne discovered.”
Tale XIV.
[1.] I know not whether this placing together of lions and tigers is to be ascribed to unacquaintance with their habits, or to idealism. Though both natives of parts of India they have not even the same districts assigned them by nature. So inimical are they also to each other, and so unlikely to herd together, that it has been supposed the tiger has exterminated the lion wherever they have met. (Ritter, Asien, vol. iv. zweite Hälfte, 689, 703, 723.) Indian fable established the lion as the king of beasts—Mrigarâga. Amara, the Indian Lexicographer, places him at the head of all beasts. The ordinary Sanskrit name is Sinha, which some translate “the killer,” from sibh, to kill. The same word (sinhanâda) stands for the roaring of the lion and for a war cry. Sinhâsana, literally a lion-seat, stands for a throne; for the lion was the typical ruler. The fables always make him out as powerful, just, temperate, and willing to take the advice of others, but often deceived by his counsellors. The lion also gave its name to the island of Ceylon, which to the Greeks was known as Taprobane, from Tâmbapanni or Tâmrapani, the capital built by Vigaja, its first historical settler (said by the natives to come from tâmra, red, and pâni, hand, because he and his companions being worn out with fatigue on their arrival lay down upon the ground and found it made their hands red; but tamra (neut.) means also red sandalwood, and parna is a leaf, which makes a more probable interpretation, but there is also another deriving from “a red swamp”). But this name passed quite out of use both among native and Greek writers in the early part of the first century. Ptolemy calls it Σαλικὴ, the Indian word being Sinhala, the Pali, Sîhala = “resting-place of the lion” (i.e. the courageous warriors, the companions of Vigaja). Kosmas has Σίελεδίβα = Sinhaladvipa, “the island Sinhala.” In the writings of the Chinese pilgrims it is called Sengkiolo, which they render “lion’s kingdom.” In the southern dialects of India l is often changed into r, and thus in Marcellinus Ammianus we find the name has become Serendivus. Out of this came zeilau and our Ceylon. In our word “Singhalese” we have a plainer trace of the lion’s share in the appellation.
The writers of the time of Alexander do not appear to have come across any authentic account of the tiger, and his people seem to have known it only from its skin bought as merchandize. Nearchos and Megasthenes both quite overstate its size, as “twice as big as a lion,” and “as big as a horse.” Augustus exhibited a tiger in Rome in the year 11 B.C., and that seems the first seen there. Claudius imported four. Pliny remarks on the extreme swiftness and wariness of the tiger and the difficulty of capturing him. His place in the fable world is generally as representative of unmitigated cruelty. The Pantcha-Tantra contains a tale, however, in which a Brahman, wearied of his existence by many reverses, goes to a tiger who has a reputation for great ferocity and begs him to rid him of his life. The tiger in this instance is so moved by the recital of the man’s afflictions that he not only spares his life, but nurtures him in his den, enriching him also with the jewelled spoil of the many travellers who fall victims to his voracity. In the end, however, the inevitable fox comes in as a bad counsellor, and persuades him the Brahman is intending to poison him, and thus overcoming his leniency, induces him to break faith with the Brahman and devour him.
[2.] Dakinis were female evil genii, who committed all sorts of horrible pranks, chiefly among the graves and at night. In this place it is more probably Raginis that are intended, beautiful beings who filled the air with melody. (Schmidt, trans, of sSanang sSetsen, p. 438, quoted by Jülg.)