Jain Shwetambar Conference Herald 1915 Book 11 Jain Itihas Sahitya Ank

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Jain Shwetambar Conference

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Shri Jaina Conference Herald.
king, strives to give in good language an attractive story in which all the persons act, as under the special circumstances and according to their individual characters they must be expected to act; and after having told his tale, the author induces a gaat, or, omniscient monk, who explains the lucky and unlucky events taking place in his story by good and bad actions which the different persons of this narrative committed in a previous existence. Such a narrator, of course, has no occasion to disfigure the pretty folk tales which he utilizes for his purpose. Bauduha narrator, on the contrary, first narrates a story of the present day, an event which, he tells us, took place in the presence of the Buddha. These stories of the present ; of course, are almost all of a very poor invention. They are followed each by a story of the past ', which is intended to show that in a previous existence of the persons who were present, when the events of the story of the present' arrived, similar accidents took place. Most of these stories of the past ' are taken from the great treasure of popular folk-lore or out of Indian story books including the great Epics and the Puranas; but the purpost of these sources must needs be distorted in order to serve the purpose of the Buddhist narrators, whose main object is to show, that the hero of their story, tne Bodhisattva, in the the different human and animal shapes he bore in his previous existences acted According to sublime moral principles. Under these circumstances all intrinsic probability, that of action and that of the characters, must needs be destroyed, as in the old Indian popular tales the tiger or the robber or tne Brahmana lad Rishyasringa, as the case may be, generally is neither a model of virtue nor a future Buddha. The Bauddha narrators, moreover, do not understand the art of varying similar situatious. Most tedious is the way, in which over and over again they employ the old well-known patterns, and a very striking feature of their stories are the foolish exaggerations with which their books • are teaming. It is clear that the huge mass of the Bauddha stories was written down by monks