North-western Province.
To carry a corpse through a chena is considered to be a very inauspicious act, which might have an injurious effect upon the crop. Even to carry through one the tools necessary for digging the grave would meet with strong remonstrances. In one instance, some of my labourers were refused a passage along the footpath in a village because they carried pickaxes and digging hoes, thus appearing, as the villagers objected, like persons who were going to dig a grave.
In The Orientalist, vol. i, p. 136, Miss S. J. Goonetilleke related a story about twenty-five idiots, in which the death prediction occurs. The monk stated that the idiot would die when the third drop of dew fell on his back while he was sheltering under a gourd. The drops fell when he was beneath a frame on which a gourd grew, waiting while some robbers whom he had joined entered a house in order to commit robbery. He bellowed out, “I am dead, I am dead,” and they all ran away.
In vol. i, p. 121, the editor, the late Mr. W. Goonetilleke, gave the Sinhalese story of the branch cutting, the monk’s prediction of the man’s death when a drop of water fell on his head from the roof, and his remarks when the bier carriers were scolded by the owner of a garden through which they were about to pass.
He also added variants. In one found in an Indian work called Bharaṭaka dvā-trin̥sikā (Thirty-two Tales of Mendicant Monks), a stupid monk called Daṇḍaka went to cut a post, and sat on the branch while chopping. Some passing travellers pointed out that when the branch broke he would fall and die; when he fell he therefore believed he must be dead, and lay still. The other monks came to carry him to the cremation ground; but on the way the road bifurcated, and they quarrelled as to which path should be followed. The supposed corpse then sat up and said that when alive he always went by the left road. Bystanders intervened and pointed out that as he had spoken he could not be dead, but Daṇḍaka insisted that he was really dead, and it was only after a long argument that the monks were convinced that he was alive.
Mr. Goonetilleke also gave a translation of a similar Turkish story in Meister Nasr Eddin’s Schwänke und Räuber und Richter, in which the man was told he would die when his ass eructated the second time. He lay down, believing he was dead. When the bier carriers were doubtful how they should pass a mudhole, the corpse sat up and said that when alive he avoided the place.
The editor also added Lithuanian, German, and Saxon variants, as well as an English one related to him by the Rev. S. Langdon, in which, however, the man broke his neck in falling from the tree.
In the South Indian account of the Guru Paramārta and his foolish disciples, annexed to the Abbé Dubois’ Pantcha-Tantra, p. 305, one of the disciples was cutting a branch when a Purōhita Brāhmaṇa warned him that he would fall when it broke. After falling he ran after the Brāhmaṇa and inquired when the Guru would die. The answer was that cold at the hinder-parts is a sign of death,[3] a remark to which the Guru’s death eventually was due.
In Indian Nights’ Entertainment (Swynnerton), p. 89, the warning was given to a weaver by a traveller, who afterwards stated that the man’s death would occur when his mouth bled. Some days afterwards the weaver saw in a glass a bit of scarlet thread stuck between his front teeth, concluded that it was blood, and lay down to die, until a customer showed him what it really was.