Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/41

 THE KALILAG AND DAMNAG LITERATURE.

Among the other points of similarity between Buddhists and Hindus, there is one which deserves more especial mention here, — that of their liking for the kind of moral-comic tales which form the bulk of the Buddhist Birth Stories. That this partiality was by no means confined to the Buddhists is apparent from the fact that books of such tales have been amongst the most favourite literature of the Hindus. And this is the more interesting to us, as it is these Hindu collections that have most nearly preserved the form in which many of the Indian stories have been carried to the West.

The oldest of the collections now extant is the one already referred to, the, that is, the 'Five Books,' a kind of Hindu 'Pentateuch' or 'Pentamerone.' In its earliest form this work is unfortunately no longer extant; but in the sixth century of our era a book very much like it formed part of a work translated into Pahlavi, or Ancient Persian; and thence, about 750 A.D., into Syriac, under the title of ',' and into Arabic under the title '.'