North Indian Inscriptions

PART B

Vol. XXI (1892), p. 239, No. 157; Barua-Sinha, BI. (1926), p. 81 f., No. 193; Barua, Barh. Vol. II (1934), p. 94 f., and Vol. III (1937), Pl. LXXIV (95a); Lüders, Bhārh. (1941), p. 174.

TEXT:
yaṁ bramano avayesi jatakaṁ^[1]

TRANSLATION:
The Jātaka ‘because the brāmaṇa played’.

   The Jātaka, to which the label refers, was identified by Subhūti as the Aṇḍabhūtajātaka, No. 62 of the Pāli Jātaka book. It is one of the numerous Jātakas illustrating the cunningness of women. The Bodhisattva is a king of Benares, who, when playing at dice with his purohita, used to sing a ditty which states that all women do something wrong when they get an opportunity. On account of the truth of this saying he always wins the game, and the purohita is threatened by utter ruin. In order to break the spell he buys a girl before she has been born and brings her up in his house without ever

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allowing her to look at a man except himself. When she has grown up, the purohita begins to play again with the king. Whenever the king sings his ditty, the purohita adds: ‘excepting my girl’, and thereby wins, while the king loses. To seduce the girl, the king then, in a most artful way, has a scamp smuggled into the purohita’s house, where they enjoy themselves to their hearts’ content. Before the lover takes leave, the couple plays a trick on the Brahmin. The girl tells him that she should like to dance and asks him to play the vīṇā for her, but blindfolded, her modesty forbidding her to dance while he is looking on. The purohita consents, and when she has danced awhile, she asks him to allow her to hit him once on the head. When the purohita has granted her request, she makes a sign to her lover who is hidden in the chamber, and he deals his unsuspecting rival a terrible blow. When after that the king and the brahmin continue their game, the usual exception of the girl made by the brahmin has lost its power and he loses again. Being informed by the king of the cause of his bad luck, he charges the girl with her misdemeanour, but she proves her innocence by a new trick perpetrated with the assistance of her lover.

   A portion of each side of the medallion which bears the inscription has been cut away when the pillar was set up as a beam in a cenotaph outside the village of Pataora. Fortunately the inscription and enough of the sculpture has been preserved to render the identification certain. In the lower half of the medallion the brahmin is sitting, blindfolded and playing the vīṇā, while the girl is standing before him stretching out her right hand. An arm with a closed fist appearing between her and the brahmin shows that the lover is concealed behind her. On the right the girl seems to have been represented once more in a dancing attitude. The upper storey of a house with two windows, a balcony and a pinnacled roof, represented in the upper half of the medallion, indicate that the scene is the house of the brahmin. For two reasons the label is of considerable importance for the history of Buddhist literature.

  The words yaṁ bramano avayesi, corresponding to yaṁ brāmaṇo avādesi in the Pāli text, are the first Pāda of the only Gāthā of the Jātaka, and the label proves that the mode of using the first line (pratīka) of the first Gāthā as the title of the Jātaka, which has been preserved in the Pāli Jātaka, had not yet gone out of fashion in the second century B.C., although the later custom of calling a Jātaka after the hero or some incident of the story was already quite
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^[1] From Cunningham’s eye-copy and photograph. Cunningham bumano, Hultzsch bram[h]ano. Bu is found in B 31, bra in B 66; the symbols do not show much difference. I can discover no subscript ha in the photograph. Cunningham’s eye-copy gives jātakaṁ, but the ja seems to have no a¬-sign.