North Indian Inscriptions

PART B

   “Four men took a cloth, and while saving one man, they all lay down with their heads broken. Also this case is highly similar”.

   4. Thieves have stolen a goat and concealed it in a bamboo thicket. When they arrive on the next day in order to slaughter the animal, they find that they have forgotten to bring a knife with them. They free the goat. It jumps around happily, and when it strikes out with the legs, a knife appears, which a maker of wickerwork has concealed there in the bamboo thicket. Immediately the thieves take it and slaughter the goat. The Gāthā reads:

aja yathā ve ugumbasmiṁ baddhā
avekkhipantī asik’ ajjhagañchhi |
ten’ eva tassā galak’ āvakantaṁ
ayam pi attho bahu tādiso va ||

“ When^[1] the goat, bound in the bamboo thicket, found the knife, while striking out^[2] (with the leg), its throat was cut with it. Also this case is highly similar”.

   At the first look, perhaps, the similarity of these stories with the narration of the Purohita, stated in the refrain of the Gāthās, seems to consist only in the fact that all cases deal with a calamity brought about by oneself. One is instantly reminded of the stanza spoken by Damanaka in the Tantrākhyāyika (I, 54), when he brings Saṁjīvaka to his master Piṅgalaka and thereby loses his influence on the lion:

jambuko huḍuyuddheno vayaṁ chāshāḍhabhūtinā |
dūtikā tantravāyena trayo’ narthās svayaṁ kṛitāḥ||

   “The jackal by the fight of rams, and we by Āshāḍhabhūti, the female-messenger by the weaver, these three are made unhappy by themselves”.

    Here also three completely different tales are bound together by the thought that in all cases the calamity is due to one’s own actions. The first story even has a parallel in the second story of the Jātaka. A jackal sees two rams fighting. It throws itself between the two in order to lick the blood which drops from their foreheads and thus meets with death between the heads of the fighting animals. But there is some important difference between these two narrations. The jackal is driven by its thirst for blood between the rams; the Kuliṅka, however, by the wish to save them from calamity. The wish to help others is also the motive of action for the son of the merchant and the four men in the third tale. Only in the story of the goat and the knife it seems to be missing. It also does not appear in the numerous other versions of the tale^[3]. However, I am convinced that in the original prose narration the finding of the knife was not a matter of chance but that the idea of the story was as follows: Thieves once had stolen a goat in order to eat it and had hidden it in a bamboo thicket. When they intended to salughter the goat, the knife was lost in the thicket. In order to help them the goat took part in the search, found the knife, and so brought death to itself. Only in this way the narration fits into the context. It is quite possible that the author thereby brought a new characteristic into the old story of the goat and the knife (ajākṛipaṇīyam^[4]), but he changed somewhat also the second story to suit his purpose. Certainly the Kuliṅka here took the place of the jackal secondarily, for whereas the interference
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^[1]yatha is striking. Do. we have to read yadā?
^[2]Andersen, ɀDMG. LXVI, p. 145, thinks of deriving avekkhipani from *avaskipati = avakshipati, which seems to be too bold.
^[3]The whole literature is mentioned in Edgerton’s instructive article “The Goat and the Knife: An Antomatic Solution of an Old Crux”, JAOS. LIX, p. 366 ff.
^[4] For the compound cf. Kāśikā to Pāṇini V, 3, 106.