Note 33 — INTRODUCTION.

No. 3, which chronicles some of the wise judgments of King Ādarśamukha, comprises two different stories—the first narrating the ingenuity with which the king satisfied the demands of a number of complainants without injuring the man who had involuntarily given rise to their complaints; the second describing a journey made by a traveller who was commissioned by various persons, animals, or other objects, passed by him on his way, to ask certain questions on his arrival at his destination. The latter story is one which is familiar to Eastern Europe. In one of its Russian variants a peasant hospitably receives an old beggar, who adopts him as his brother, and invites him to pay him a visit. On his way to the beggar’s home, he is appealed to by children, who say, “Christ’s brother, ask Christ whether we must suffer here long.” Later on, girls engaged in ladling water from one well into another beg him to ask the same question on their account. When he arrives at his journey’s end he becomes aware that his beggar friend is Christ himself; and he is informed that the children he had passed on the way had been cursed by their mothers while still unborn, and so were unable to enter Paradise; and the girls had, while they were alive, adulterated the milk they sold with water, and were therefore condemned to an eternal punishment resembling that of the Danaides (Afanasief, “Legendui,” No. 8). The judgments attributed in the Tibetan tale to King Ādarśamukha, and in another Tibetan work, the “Dsanglun” (as Professor Schiefner has remarked) to King Mdges-pa, form the subject of a story well known in Russia under the title of “Shemyakin Sud,” or “Shemyaka’s Judgment.” It exists there as a folk-tale, but it belongs to what may be called the chap-book literature of the country, and it is derived from literary sources. A variant given by Afanasief (“Skazki,” v., No. 19) closely resembles part of the Tibetan tale. A poor man borrowed from his rich brother a pair of oxen, with which he ploughed his plot of ground. Coming away from the field he met an old man, who asked to whom the oxen belonged. “To my brother,” was the reply. “Your brother is rich and stingy,” said the old man; “choose which you will, either his son shall die or his oxen.” The poor man thought and thought. He was sorry both for the oxen and for his brother’s son. At last he said, “Better let the oxen die.” “Be it as you wish,” said the old man. When the poor man reached his home the oxen suddenly fell down dead. The rich brother accused him of having worked them to death, and carried him off to the king. On his way to the king’s court the poor man, according to the chap-book version (“Skazki,” viii. p. 325), accidentally sat down upon a baby and killed it, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but only succeeded in crushing an old man whose son was taking him into the river for a bath. He had also had the misfortune to pull off a horse’s tail without meaning it. When summoned into court for all these involuntary offences, he took a stone in his pocket tied up in a handkerchief, and stealthily produced it when he was had up before the judge, saying to himself, “If the judge goes against me I will kill him with this.” The judge fancied that the stone was a bribe of a hundred roubles which the defendant wished to offer him; so he gave judgment in his favour in each case. The poor man was to keep his brother’s horse until its tail grew again, and to marry the woman whose child he had crushed, and to stand under the bridge from which he had jumped and allow the son of the man he had killed to jump off the bridge on to him. The owner of the horse, the husband of the woman, and the son of the crushed man were all glad to buy off the culprit whom they had brought up for judgment. The satirical turn of the story and the allusion to bribe-taking are characteristic features of the Russian variants of this well-known Eastern tale. The Russian story takes its title from the notorious injustice and oppression of Prince Demetrius Shemyaka, who blinded his cousin, Vasily II., Grand Prince of Moscow, and for a time usurped his throne. To this day an unjust legal decision is known as a Shemyaka judgment. But in the Eastern versions of the story, which are numerous, there is no mention of injustice; stupidity, however, is sometimes attributed by them to the judge. Thus in the Kathá Sarit Ságara33 the story of Devabhúti tells how the excellent wife of the learned Brahman of that name “went into the kitchen garden to get vegetables, and saw a donkey belonging to a washerman eating them. So she took up a stick and ran after the donkey, and the animal fell into a pit as it was trying to escape and broke its hoof. When its master heard of that, he came in a passion and beat with a stick and kicked the Brahman woman. Accordingly she, being pregnant, had a miscarriage, but the washerman returned home with his donkey. Then her husband, hearing of it, came home after bathing, and, after seeing his wife, went in his distress and complained to the chief magistrate of the town. The foolish man immediately had the washerman, whose name was Balásura, brought before him, and, after hearing the pleadings of both parties, delivered this judgment: ‘Since the donkey’s hoof is broken, let the Bráhman carry the donkey’s load for the washerman until the donkey is again fit for work, and let the washerman make the Bráhman’s wife pregnant again, since he made her miscarry. Let this be the punishment of the two parties respectively.’ When the Bráhman heard this, he and his wife in their despair took poison and died. And when the king heard of it, he put to death that inconsiderate judge.”