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SEPTEMBER, 1879.)
THE STORY OF THE FAITHFUL DEER.
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Christ then blesses all the fathers, beginning with Adam, and rises with them in triumphal procession to paradise, where he delivers them to the archangel Michael.
Is the resemblance of the two legends accidental, or is it possible that in the Buddhist account, we have one of those faint reflections of Christian influence (derived perhaps from Persian Christians settled in western and southern India) which Professor Weber has endeavoured to trace in the doctrine of faith as taught in the Bhagavad Gita, and some of the medieval schools of the Vedanta ? Much must depend on the date of the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Maury and Cowper would place it as low as
the fifth century, but Tischendorf with greater probability would refer it to the second.11 Even if the present form in which we have the legend is interpolated, much of it must surely be of an earlier date, and we find direct allusion to events described there, in the pseudo-Epiphanius' homily in Sepulchrum Christi, and in the fifteenth sermon of Eusebius of Alexandria."? At the same time wo have no reason to suppose that the Buddhist legend was connected with the earliest worship of Avalokiteswara. It is not alluded to by the Chinese travellers in India, and the date of the Karanda-vyúha can only be 80 far fixed, that it seems to have been translated into Tibetan in the ninth century.-From The Journal of Philology, vol. VI. (1876), pp. 222-231.
THE STORY OF THE FAITHFUL DEER.
BY Rev. S. BEAL. There is, perhaps, no fable so frequently met snare of the huntsman, stopped in the neighwith in Buddhist books, and also depicted on bourhood, and would not leave the spot where coins and in sculptures, as the story of Buddha he was. Meantime, all the other deer having when he was the king of the Deer. It is fled from the spot, the Deer-mother spake as possible that this very story is that called the follows in Gáthás which she addressed to Miga-Jataka at Bharhut, at any rate it is one the king :that carries interest with it, both as it exempli. "Deer-king! exert your strength, fies the daty of wife-life devotion, and also ex- Push with your head and your heel, hibits in the simplest way the mode of instruc- Break to pieces the trap which man tion adopted by the founder of the Buddhist Has set to catch you, and escape." religion, to impress on the minds of his fol. Then the Deer-king answered in the followlowers the moral lessons it was his aim to ing Gathas, and said inculcate.
" Although I used all my strength, ! The Story of the Deer-king.
Yet I could not escape from this trap, I remember, in years gone by, there was in
Made as it is with thongs of skin, sewed the neighbourhood of Banaras a certain en
with silk, closure (district : aránya), in which a Deer
In vain should I struggle to get away from king with his herd had found a place of pasture,
such a snare. and lived in contentment. At this time a
Oh! ye mountain dells and sweetest foun"hunter, having discovered the spot where these
tains ! deer congregated, set a snare to entrap one or
May none of your occupants henceforth, more of them, and as it happened he caught
Meet with such a misfortune as this !" the king of the herd himself. At this time a And the Gáthas continue as follows: certain hind, the wife of the Deer-king, big
“At this time those two deer, with young, seeing the Deer-king thus in the
Filled with alarm, and shedding bitter tears,
11 Quæ omnia conjuncta ejusmodi sunt ut libellum nostrum ex antiquissimo scripto apocrypho secundi seculi haustum vel transcriptum putem. Evang. Apoor.
11 The phrase in Athanasius' tņird sermon in Arios re. minds one of the legend, though it may be only rhetorical phrase,- X' oude Déuts aliyelmeix de la Toy
p. 78.
Κύριον, δν οι πυλωροί του “Αδου πτήξαντες εξαφηκαν TÒY Aðny.
13 In Csomo Körösi's paper (Asiat. Res. vol XX. P 530) it is said to have been translated by Sakya-prabha and Katparakshita; the former is associated in p. 516 and p. 580 with Bande-ye-shade, one of the well known Tibetan translators of the 9th century (p. 527).
