Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/219

Rh Buddhist parables were probably by the vast majority of their hearers believed as statements of fact. The belief in Metempsychosis, or rather in Transformation, existed long before Buddhism arose. Although the doctrine preached by Sâkyamuni was different from this, it was a philosophic refinement of it, the result of the growth of speculation during many centuries. But there is no reason to hold that the "folk" shared this growth. They hardly grasped the subtilty of the doctrine of Karma; and the Pāli Jātaka, so far as is known to the present reviewer, affords none of the hints like those given in the work before us of anything beyond the coarsest literalness.

The Gâtakamâlâ stands, in fact, on a different plane of culture from the Pāli Jātaka. Its more distinctly literary and self-conscious manner is an index of a higher civilisation. It takes a broader survey of life and of religion. It is less near to the traditional basis of the collection. The author is intent on elegance and on moral teaching, rather than on the mere pleasure of story-telling and the reproduction of tales that have been handed down. For students who confine their attention to the history and transmission of stories this renders the Gâtakamâlâ less interesting than the Pāli work.

Yet even from this point of view the Gâtakamâlâ offers some curious problems. Take, for instance, the story of Unmâdayantî (No. 13). Unmâdayantî was a maiden of such surpassing beauty that her father offered her to the king. The king sent some Brâhmans to see he; but they, fearing the influence of her beauty, reported that she had inauspicious marks, and so dissuaded the monarch from wedding her. One of his officers therefore married her. She, however, was angry with the king for spurning her; and one festival day when mounted in his royal chariot he drove through the town, she took care to place herself full in his view, decked out so as to show her beauty off to the best advantage. The result was as might have been foreseen: the king fell madly in love with her. So far the lines of the story and those of Edgar and Elfrida are parallel. The end is different. For when the king knew who she was he refused to accept her from her husband's hands, though the latter hastened to offer her. The story also occurs in the Pāli, but the Pāli Jātaka has not yet been translated into English. It occurs, too, in the Vetâlapañkavimsati, and thrice in almost the same words in the Kathā-