Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/570

 5o6 Reviews.

It is not difficult to understand the train of reasoning which led Benfey to suppose that the original Panchatantra was a Buddhist treatise. He saw that the texts which lay before him had been retouched and adapted in all possible ways, and he therefore concluded that the Pahlavi form of the work was the most ancient. The best representative of this lost ancient version is the Syriac translation made about 570 a.d. In this was found a Buddhist extract, which has been proved to be no part of the Panchatantra, and has been subsequently found in a Tibetan work. He was confirmed in his supposition by finding many of the stories of the Panchatantra in Buddhist collections. Moreover, the textus si7)ipliclor, on which Kosegarten's edition was partly founded, was an adaptation of the original by a Jain, and the expanded version, to which Kosegarten was also partly indebted for his text, was the work of Purnabhadra, another Jain. As Dr. Meyer remarks, — "The sang froid shown by the Jains in using celebrated names of Hindu history and current tales for their own purposes is simply wonderful." In Benfey's time the Jains were supposed to be a sect of Buddhists, and the opposition between the two religions had not been discovered. Moreover, it was the fashion in those days to ascribe to Buddhist influence every sentiment that savoured of tenderness to animal life, and romantic self-sacrifice, as if these ideas were not the common property of the Indian race. If Benfey had had before him the wealth of material which has been obtained by Dr. Hertel, he would, as that scholar remarks, have been led to different conclusions.

Dr. Hertel believes in the literal truth of the story that the king Nushirawan sent an emissary to India to bring back a version of the Panchatantra, and that the work was explained to him by his Indian teacher in Sanskrit, which was, as he gives strong reasons for thinking, even in those days the court language. This is strongly supported by the fact that the forms of proper names in the Syriac version, which is immediately derived from the Pahlavi, show that they must have been com- municated in Sanskrit, not in the more modern Prakrit.

Bishop Caldwell is said to have insisted upon the non-moral character of the Panchatantra. Dr. Hertel seems to have come

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