Page:Curiosities of Olden Times.djvu/255

King Robert of Sicily entered the bird, which sat up, plumed its feathers, and began to chatter. At the same moment the true Mukunda pronounced the magic words, dropped his adopted body, and darted into that which had originally been his. At the sight of the reviving monarch, the queen wrung the parrot's neck, and thus destroyed the impostor."

This story is based on the great Buddhist doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and was evidently a very popular illustration of that fundamental dogma, for variations of it are common in most ancient Sanscrit collections. Thus in the Katha Sarit Sagara, a work of Soma Deva, written between A.D. 1113-1125, the story reappears considerably altered, but still told with the design of insisting on the doctrine of transmigration of souls. Soma Deva's tale is this in brief:—

Vararutschi, Vyâdi, and Indradatta desired to learn the new lessons of Varscha, but could not pay the stipulated fee—a million pieces of gold. They determined to ask King Nanda—a contemporary of Alexander the Great, by the way—to pay it for them, and they visited his capital. They are too late: Nanda is just dead. However, determined to obtain the requisite sum, Indradatta leaves his body in a wood, guarded by his companions, and sends his soul into the dead king. Then Vararutschi goes to him, asks, and receives the gold, whilst Vyadi sits beside the deserted body.

But the prime minister suspected that the revived 243