Note 51 — INTRODUCTION.

The story of Viśvaṇtara (No. 16), the princely Bodisat, who not only gives away all his property and retires into the forest of penance, but even surrenders his two children to a cruel slave-owner, and finally hands over his wife to a stranger who demands her, has been already told by Mr. Spence Hardy in his “Manual of Buddhism” (pp. 116–124), under the title of “The Wessantara Játaka;” but as it is one of the most touching of the class of legends to which it belongs, having in it more of human interest than such narratives generally contain, and as the Tibetan variant is the more poetic and pathetic of the two renderings of the tale, Professor Schiefner has done good service by translating it. Such acts of renunciation as the princely Bodisat accomplished do not commend themselves to the Western mind. An Oriental story-teller can describe a self-sacrificing monarch as cutting slices of flesh off his own arms and plunging them into the fire in honour of a deity, and yet not be afraid of exciting anything but a religious thrill among his audience. To European minds such a deed would probably appear grotesque. And so the Eastern tales in praise of self-sacrifice do not seem to have impressed the lay mind of Europe. On ecclesiastical literature they probably exerted considerable influence. But folk-tales do not often deal with such heroic operations as were performed by Prince Viśvaṇtara in cutting himself loose from all worldly ties in order that nothing might prevent him from becoming the consummate Buddha. The sorrows of Madrī, the princely ascetic’s wife, who is reduced by her husband’s passion for giving everything away first to exile and poverty, then to bitter grief on account of the loss of her dearly loved little children, and finally to slavery, but who submits to all her husband’s commands, may be compared with those of the patient Grisildes whose praises Chaucer has sung in “The Clerke’s Tale.” The Clerk states in his prologue that the story was one which he “lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,” whose name was “Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete;” Petrarch having freely translated it in the year 1373 from Boccaccio’s “Decamerone.” This story, however, appears to have been current in Italy for some time before. In folk-tales the similar sorrows of a wife who is condemned to a series of humiliations by a harsh husband are often described; but the husband’s conduct is generally accounted for by the fact that his wife had at first rejected him with contumely, and he had made up his mind to retaliate. Patient Grissel’s husband had absolutely no excuse to plead for his cruelty, nor can much be said in extenuation of that of such a husband as the German “King Thrushbeard” (Grimm, No. 52), the Norwegian “Hacon Grizzlebeard” (“Tales from the Norse,” No. 6), or the Italian “King of Fairland,” the husband of the proud Cintiella (Basile’s “Pentamerone,” No. 40). The Russian variant of “Patient Grissel’s Story” (Afanasief, v. No. 29) seems worthy of mention, as not being likely to be familiar to Western Europe. A king marries a peasant’s daughter on condition that she shall never find fault with anything he says or does. She makes him an excellent wife, and never opposes his will, even when he takes her children from her, pretending that they are to be put to death, in order that his neighbours might not laugh at them as being sprung from a peasant mother; or when he sends her back to her father’s hut, and then recalls her from it as a servant, and orders her to get ready the room intended for his new bride. But the Russian story, as it stands alone (with the exception of the opening), is probably an echo from abroad.51