Page:Barlaam and Josaphat. English lives of Buddha.djvu/77

lxxi where there is a tree whose branches are the elements and whose leaves are the things of sense coloured by good and ill. Again, there is the marvellous tree Ilpa, from whose branches honey or soma trickles (Benfey, l. c., 83).

But we are not only dependent upon general analogies for the proof of the Indian origin of this parable. Benfey discovered two forms of the parable in the Chinese Buddhistic work entitled Avadana. Mr. Clouston has found it in the eleventh book of the Mahabharata, and Dr. Kuhn has traced it in a Jaina work. Here we have the parable, not alone traced to India, but, in the Avadana and Jaina forms, closely connected with Buddhism. The story occurs in some of the Arabic forms of the Fables of Bidpai, whence it got into Europe through another source than the Barlaam. In the Bombay Arabic version of Barlaam there are distinctive peculiarities which are of critical importance, though this has not hitherto been observed. Most of these versions resemble one another, generally both in the story and in the allegory which it is intended to adorn. But there are divergences of detail which deserve