Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/83

Rh The Arabian authors of the work translated (through the ancient Persian) from this older collection assign it to a certain Bidpai; who is said to have composed it in order to instruct Dabschelim, the successor of Alexander in his Indian possessions, in worldly wisdom. There may well be some truth in this tradition. And when we consider that the 'Barlaam and Josaphat' literature took its origin at the same time, and in the same place, as the 'Kalilag and Damnag' literature; that both of them are based upon Buddhist originals taken to Bagdad in the sixth century of our era; and that it is precisely such a book as the Book of Birth Stories from which they could have derived all that they borrowed; it is difficult to avoid connecting these facts together by the supposition that the work ascribed to Bidpai may, in fact, have been a selection of those Jātaka stories bearing more especially on the conduct of life, and preceded, like our own collection, by a sketch of the life of the Buddha in his last birth. Such a supposition would afford a reasonable explanation of some curious facts which have been quite inexplicable on the existing theory. If the Arabic 'Kalilah and Dimnah' was an exact translation, in our modern sense of the word translation, of an exact translation of a Buddhist work, how