Two Prakrit Versions of Manipati Charitra

Author(s): R Williams
Publisher: Royal Asiatic Society

Page 48

THE STORIES
35
in the Vikrama-carita.1 A king's son goes hunting despite unfavourable omens. His horse bolts and he is treed by a tiger. He is alarmed to find that a bear has also taken refuge in the tree but this animal calms his fears and when he grows tired allows him to sleep in its arms, resisting suggestions by the tiger that it should throw him down. Then the roles of man and bear are reversed and the tiger tempts the man using as an argument the familiar lines:
na đi năm ca nakh nam ca sợ ng năm sāstra-pân năm viśvāso naiva kartavyaḥ strīşu rājakuleṣu
The man yields and lets the bear fall but it saves itself by catching a projecting branch. When the tiger goes away the bear goes too but curses the prince to become mad.
In the Jainistic recension of the Vikrama-carita the story is almost the same but the prince's bedmate is an ape not a bear, and it is not deliberately but through confusion of mind (bhrāntacittena) that he lets it fall. Here too the man becomes mad as a consequence of his act for the divinity of the tree is incarnated in the ape.
12. Carabhaṭī
Under the title: La novella della brahmana e dell' icneumone nella redazione prakrita del Munivaicariyam Belloni-Filippi published from the MPCH the text of the nine verses covering this story as well as the parallel passage from the MPCS. Discussing the versions of the legend found in the Katha-saritsagara, the Bṛhat-kathā-mañjarī, the Hitopadeśa and the various recensions of the Pañcatantra he distinguished two basic types according to whether it is the husband or the wife who kills the mongoose.
Another possible line of demarcation lies between those versions where the child dies from the snake's bite and those in which the snake is killed before it can bite. To the former category belong the versions of the MPC (but not of the MPCJ and MPCH), the BKK and the Avaśyaka3 commentaries, where
1 Vikrama's Adventures ed. Edgerton (Harvard Oriental Series 27), p. 34 ff. RSO, vol. IV, 1911-12, pp. 1015-20. Avasyaka-sutra Agamodaya Samiti ed. Part I, p. 93b.