Note 46 — INTRODUCTION.

The long history of “Prince Jīvaka, the King of Physicians” (No. 6), has little in common with Western folk-lore. The cures he performs, by either opening the skull and removing from the brain headache-producing centipedes, or else eliminating such similar intruders by a less heroic operation, may, however, be likened to somewhat similar kinds of surgical treatment mentioned in European folk-tales. Thus in a modern Greek story46 a girl is relieved from the presence of a number of snakes which had taken up their abode within her by being suspended from a branch of a tree above a caldron of boiling milk, the vapour arising from which induced the reptiles to come forth. There is an English story also of a country clergy-man who could obtain no rest from headaches, till at last he induced the village blacksmith to hit him on the head with his largest hammer. The ecclesiastic’s skull cracked beneath the blow, and out came sufficient swarms of earwigs to account for his complaint. But this story requires verification. The cure effected at p. 103, to which no parallel is found in the variant of the legend in Mr. Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” though the skull-opening incident occurs in it (p. 242), resembles that brought about by Kīrtisenā in the case of King Vasudatta’s headache in the Kathā Sarit Sāgara.47 She learnt how to treat the malady from a Rākshasī, who gave the following instructions as to how the king might be cured, unaware that a human being was listening:—“First his head must be anointed by rubbing warm butter on it, and then it must be placed for a long time in the heat of the sun, intensified by noonday. And a hollow cane-tube must be inserted into the aperture of his ear, which must communicate with a hole in a plate, and this plate must be placed above a pitcher of cool water. Accordingly the centipedes will be annoyed by heat and perspiration, and will come out of his head, and will enter that cane-tube from the aperture of the ear, and, desiring coolness, will fall into the pitcher.” Kīrtisenā carried out these instructions, and the result was that she “extracted from the head of that king, through the aperture of the ear, one hundred and fifty centipedes.”