Note 54 — INTRODUCTION.

Stories about ungrateful wives are popular in Asia. In No. 21, “How a woman requites love,” a husband twice saves his wife’s life, once by rescuing her from his brothers, who proposed to feed upon her when destitute of other food in a desert, and again by supplying her with food and drink, much to his own inconvenience, when she was faint from hunger and thirst. “He sliced some flesh off his thighs,” says the narrator, “and gave it to her to eat; and then he opened the veins of both his arms and gave her the blood to drink.” In spite of which, she conspired against him with a handless and footless cripple. In one of the Indian variants of the story (“Panchatantra,” iv. 5), the husband’s self-sacrifice takes a more poetic form. In the midst of a forest a wife suffered intensely from thirst. Her husband went to seek water. When he came back with some his wife was dead. A voice was heard saying that if he would give up half of his own life hers would be renewed. He immediately pronounced a formula by which he surrendered half of his life, and his wife was thereby resuscitated. Soon afterwards, being in a garden one day during the absence of her husband, she heard a cripple singing so beautifully that she fell in love with him at once. So she took an early opportunity of pushing her husband into a well. After which she led a wandering life, carrying about the cripple in a basket on her head. But her husband, who had not been killed by his fall, escaped from the well, and at length confronted her one day in the presence of a king, and demanded back the half of his life which he had given her. She uttered formal words of surrender and fell dead. The Indian variant of the story in the Daśakumāracharita is closely akin to the Tibetan, the husband assuaging his wife’s hunger and thirst by means of his own flesh and blood, and being rewarded by being pushed into a well by his wife, who had fallen in love with a cripple whose hands, feet, nose, and ears had been cut off by robbers.54 This story appears to be the original of a singular Mongol tale (Jülg’s “Mongolische Märchen,” p. 105). A man and his wife were walking along near a cliff, when they heard so lovely a voice resounding that the woman said to herself, “I should like to belong to the man who possesses so charming a voice,” and she proceeded to push her husband into a well. Then she set off in search of the possessor of the voice. When she found him, he turned out to be a loathsome invalid, whose groans had been rendered melodious by the echoing cliff. Full of remorse, she tried to make up for the murder of her husband by carrying away the invalid, under whose disagreeable weight she pined away and eventually died (Benfey, “Panchatantra,” i. pp. 436–444). The form assumed by the story in the Kathā Sarit Sāgara55 is almost identical with that in the Kah-gyur. The end, however, is more savage in the Indian than in the Tibetan variant. After the ungratefulness of the wife had been exposed, the king’s ministers “cut off her nose and ears and branded her, and banished her from the country with the maimed man. And in this matter Fate showed a becoming combination, for it united a woman without nose and ears with a man without hands and feet.” In the “Three Snake Leaves” (Grimm, No. 16), a wife who has been resuscitated after her death by her husband conspires against him with a ship-captain and has him flung into the sea. He is saved, however, and she and her accomplice are ultimately discovered and sentenced to be drowned.