Page:The Fables of Bidpai (Panchatantra).djvu/23

Rh the search is rendered peculiarly difficult, and therefore fascinating, by the fact that the Indian original has disappeared, and its features can only be guessed at by the family likeness shown in its earliest descendants. By combining the common features of the nearest of kin to the Sanskrit original—the Old Syriac, the Arabic and the Tibetan versions—Professor Benfey has produced a “composite portrait” of the original (Introduction to Kalilag, pp. vi.-x.) From this it appears that the source of this multifarious literature was a “Mirror for Princes,” in thirteen books of tales and fables connected together by an ingenious framework, which brought the stories to bear upon the problems of conduct. An Indian sage named variously in the versions Vishnuçarman, Bidpai, Pilpay, or Sendebar, tells them to his king to incite him to virtue. It is in this device of a framework to connect the stories that the literary significance of the book consists, and it is owing to this that it has managed to keep the component tales together through so many vicissitudes.

Many of the tales occur in another connection, and enclosed in another “frame,” in the Jātaka Tales, or Buddhist Birth Stories, which may detain