Note 300.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF (continued 2)

The Kah-gyur, a sacred work of Tibetan Buddhism dating back to the eleventh century or thereabouts, contains a story of king Ánanda. The name Ánanda is famous in the literature of Buddhism as that of a favourite disciple of the master; but it is here used in the indiscriminate way in which the mediæval friars used the names of Pompey, Titus, Pliny, and other famous Romans, in the Gesta Romanorum. This king had five sons, of whom the youngest was endowed with qualities better suited to a ruler than the others, and to whom accordingly he desired to leave the kingdom. But he feared that if he invested his youngest son with sovereign power, his kinsmen would reproach him for having passed over his elder sons. As a way of escape from the difficulty he decreed that after his death his sons should be tested, and that he should be made king whom the jewel-shoes should fit, under whom the throne should remain steadfast, and on whose head the diadem should rest unshaken, whom the women should recognize, and who should guess six objects to be divined by insight.300.1 There is a triple test here—divination by the royal insignia, the choice of the harem, and the solution of a riddle. I shall return to the two former tests. But before passing to another type of story I may note that in the Bakhtyár-Náma, a Persian romance translated by Sir William Ouseley, who brought it from the East in the early part of the last century, there is a story in which the succession to the throne is made to depend upon the solution of three riddles. The king having died without issue, it was resolved to go to the prison and propound three questions to the criminals confined there. He who answered best was recognized as king.300.2 Riddles are regarded in certain stages of civilization as a test of more than ordinary wisdom. Their position in the evolution of thought and custom is well worth investigation. It is too large a subject for discussion here.