________________
HARIBHADRA'S ṢADDARŚANA SAMUCCAYA :
VERSES 81-84: A STUDY
RAMKRISHNA BHATTACHARYA
Humour is not a strong point of ancient Indian philosophers, or philosophers in general. Excepting some sharp repartees, ingenious ironies and downright abuses, humour proper is seldom to be met with in philosophical works. One notable exception is the parable of the wolf's footprint. In what follows we propose to discuss it in some detail. The parable originated most probably with the Carvākas and was quite well known in the Jain, Buddhist and Brahminical circles.
The first allusion to the parable occurs in the Mahabharata, Santiparvan, Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya.1 Bhisma tells Yudhisthira that the acquisition of righteousness (dharma) and wealth is the direct object of a Ksatriya (one born in the warrior caste) and one should not get involved in deciding what is righteousness and what is not, for noone has seen their results. So it is as useless as the discussion about the wolf's footprint :
adharmo dharma ityetad yatha vṛkapadam tathā
Nilakantha (seventeenth century CE) in his commentary left the word, vṛkapadam unexplained, presumably because he did not know the parable behind the simile. He wrote, "As the judgment regarding the footprint on the ground-whether it belongs to a wolf or a dog or a leopard-is futile, so is the judgment whether something contributes to righteousness or to its opposite."2
An earlier scribe fared no better. Baffled by the word, vṛkapadam he 'emended' it to read vrkṣaphalam, 'fruit of a tree'. Vädiraja (fourteenth century) in his commentary on the Santiparvan, explicated it accordingly: etad anayoh phalam vṛkṣaphalam yathā tathā kālāntare drsyate, The fruit (result) of these (righteousness and its opposite) is seen, like the fruit of a tree, at a different time.'3
Although the parable was known right from the first centuries of the Common Era and attributed to the Lokayatikas by the sixth century,
1.
2.
3.
Mbh., Crit. ed., 132. lef-2ab; Vulgate ed., 134.2.
Mbh, Vulgate ed., p. 1505.
Quoted in the Crit. ed., p. 696n.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
