Part 3

It happened that the chief of a tribe of Tsongols possessed a copy of a part of the Kah-gyur, and this he gave to the appreciative stranger, who rose still higher in the opinion of the natives when they found that he had ordered a silken wrapper to be made for each of the volumes presented to him. He himself was delighted, he says, at becoming “the proprietor of the first Tibetan work of any length which had up to that time passed into the hands of a European.” After all this he was well received wherever he went. A prediction had been made a year before that a foreign convert to Buddhism, destined to spread that religion in the West, was about to visit Mongolia, and this prophecy was interpreted in his favour. The Buriat Lamas even looked upon him as “a Khoubil-ghan, an incarnation of an important personage in the Buddhist Pantheon.” After a time he organised a band of copyists, sometimes twenty in number, who lived in tents in his courtyard, and frequently consumed as much as a hundred pounds of beef in a day, besides much brick tea, a caldron being kept always on the boil for their use. At the end of a year he possessed a collection of Mongol and Tibetan books, containing two thousand works and separate treatises.

Happening to visit the temple of Subulin, he found that the Lamas were manufacturing an enormous prayer wheel. He offered to get the printing of the oft-repeated prayer done for them at St. Petersburg, whereby their machine would be rendered far more efficacious than if they trusted to native typography. They accepted his offer gladly, and to prove their gratitude, presented to him, in the name of the tribe, a complete copy of the Kah-gyur which they possessed, having obtained it from a Mongol Lama. Both parties to this transaction were equally pleased; for when the printed leaves came from St. Petersburg, it was found that each of them contained 2500 repetitions of the sacred formula, and the words were printed in red ink, which is 108 times more efficacious than black; and the paper itself was stamped with the same words instead of bearing the maker’s name. So the Buriates were charmed, and so was the European bibliophile, who had got possession of what he had scarcely hoped ever to obtain, a copy of the Kah-gyur in 101 volumes, printed in the monastery of Nartang in Western Tibet. This copy, after the death of Baron Schilling de Canstadt, was purchased from his heirs by the Emperor Nicholas, and presented to the Academy of Sciences.

M. Vasilief, the well-known author of the “History of Buddhism,” which has been translated from Russian into French and German, says [27] that when he was at Pekin he made inquiries about the Kah-gyur and Tan-gyur, and he was shown the building in which they used to be printed. But no edition, he was told, had been brought out for some time. Some of the wood blocks were lost, others had suffered injury. However, a copy of each work was procured by the Chinese Government and presented to the Russian mission. These copies are now in St. Petersburg. The Mongol Buriates of Russia, M. Vasilief states, are even more devoted to their religion, and look to Lhassa more longingly than their kinsmen in Mongolia itself. They read their sacred books, or hear them read, in Tibetan, and are edified, even though they do not comprehend. Any one who wishes to command a reading of the Kah-gyur or Tan-gyur addresses himself to one of the monasteries which possess those works, pays a certain price, and provides tea for the Lamas. A reading of the Kah-gyur, it seems, used to come to about fifteen pounds at one of the monasteries, exclusive of tea. At a given signal all the Lamas flock together, and take their places according to seniority. Before each are placed a number of leaves of the work, and off they set, all reading at once, so that the entire performance occupies only a few hours, after which each reader receives his share of the offering made by the orderer of the function.

Of the Russian scholars who availed themselves of the presence of the two editions of the Kah-gyur at St. Petersburg, the most enthusiastic and industrious was the late Professor Anton von Schiefner. From the Dulvā, the first of the seven divisions of that work, he translated into German the legends and tales, an English version of which is contained in the present volume. His German versions all appeared in the “Mélanges Asiatiques tirés du Bulletin de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg” (tom. vi.–viii.), with the exceptions of Nos. 2 and 5, which were published in the “Mémoires” of that Society (series vii., tom. xix., No. 6). Professor Schiefner, if he had lived another year, would have doubtless supplied a number of additional notes, and would have written an Introduction to the work. His lamented death on November 16, 1880, has deprived the present volume of what would probably have been one of its most interesting parts. It was at Professor Schiefner’s express wish that the present translation was undertaken. It must be a subject of universal regret that he did not live to witness its appearance in print. The following tribute to his merits as a scholar was contributed, soon after his death, by Professor Albrecht Weber to “Trübner’s Record.”

“Professor F. Anton von Schiefner was a distinguished scholar of most various attainments. His specialty, however, was Tibetan, and more particularly the investigation of Buddhist legends of Indian and Occidental origin, a collection of which in English will soon be published by Messrs. Trübner & Co. He had, moreover, devoted himself with rare perseverance and disinterestedness to the utilisation and publication of the labours of two scholars whose own restless activity would, without him, have been almost entirely lost to the scientific world—namely, those of the Finnic linguist, Alexander Castrèn, and of the Caucasian linguist, Baron von Uslar. One might—sit venia verbo—almost say that both men had found in Schiefner their Homer. He edited the labours of Castrèn almost wholly from the posthumous papers of that brave and modest man, who, from 1838 to 1849, explored, under the greatest privations, the inhospitable regions of Norway, Lapland, and Siberia, where the tribes of the Finnic race are seated. Castrèn’s Reiseerinnerungen and Reiseberichte, edited by Schiefner, present a vivid picture of the hardships Castrèn had to go through, and which finally caused his premature death, in 1852, at the age of thirty-nine. We have lying before us the twelve volumes of his Samoyedan and Tungusian Grammars and Vocabularies, as well as those of the languages of the Buryats, Koibals, Karagasses, Ostyaks, &c.; his ethnological lectures on the Altaic races, and those on Finnic mythology—all worked out by Schiefner’s deft hand, and edited by him from 1835 to 1861. In connection therewith Schiefner also made a German translation of the Finnic national epos Kalevala, and also one of the Hero-Sagas of the Minussin Tatars. Schiefner was more advantageously situated in working up the collections of the estimable Caucasian linguist, Major-General von Uslar (1816 to 1873), written in the Russian language, with whom, until the General’s death, he was always able to confer directly. While Schiefner’s own and entirely independent work on the Thush language (1856), by the accuracy with which a hitherto quite uncultivated and altogether strange department was opened to linguistic investigation, had obtained for the author general appreciation, the united efforts of both scholars have furnished surprising results as regards these highly peculiar languages of the Caucasian mountaineers—the Avares, Abchases, Tchetchenzes, Kasikumüks, Kurines—which by their extraordinary sounds, as well as by their most singular grammatical structure, produce so very strange an impression. The personal intercourse with soldiers of Caucasian origin, garrisoned at St. Petersburg, was herein of high importance to Schiefner. His amiable and open manner in personal intercourse, characteristic of the whole man, bore him excellent fruit in this case. Science, and especially the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, has by Schiefner’s death sustained a heavy, indeed a quite irreparable, loss.” [28]

The edition of the Kah-gyur on which Professor Schiefner worked appears (says M. Vasilief, the author of the “History of Buddhism”) to have been that in 108 volumes, printed at Pekin during the eighteenth century, and presented to the Asiatic Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences by the Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had received it, about the year 1850, from the Russian Mission in China.

The notes to the present volume signed S. are by Professor Schiefner. A few others have been added, consisting for the most part of extracts from Professor Monier Williams’s Sanskrit Dictionary. The forms of Indian names adopted by Professor Schiefner have been retained in the English translation, with certain modifications—y being substituted for j, for instance, ch for tsh, and j for dsh. It ought to be stated that Professor Schiefner made several important corrections on the sheets which he prepared for the use of his English translator, and therefore the English version will sometimes be found to differ materially from the German text. [29]

To European folk-tales the longer legends of the Kahgyur bear but little resemblance, though many of the fables about animals, and other short stories towards the end of the present volume, have their counterparts in the West. Here and there, however, even in the long narratives of the legendary class, certain features may be recognised as being common to both Europe and Asia. The moral of King Māndhātar’s story (No. 1), for instance, seems to be identical, different as is its machinery, with that of a story which is current in many Western lands. That monarch, after conquering the whole earth, ascends into the heavenly home of the thirty-three gods, and is allowed to share the throne of their chief, Śakra or Indra. But at last he wishes for too much. “He came to the conclusion that he must expel the king of the gods, Śakra, from his throne, and take into his own hands the government of both gods and men.” As soon as he had conceived this idea, “the great King Māndhātar came to the end of his good fortune,” and soon afterwards he died. The most familiar form of the European story, which inculcates a similar moral teaching, is the German tale of “The Fisherman and his Wife” (the 19th of Grimm’s Collection). In it, a grateful fish for a long time accedes to every desire expressed by the fisherman. He and his wife become first rich, then noble, and eventually royal. But the fisherman’s wife is not satisfied with being a queen. She wishes to be the Pope, and the fish fulfils her desire. Even then she is discontented, and at last she demands to be made God. When the fish is told this by her husband, it replies, “Go back, and you will find her in her hovel.” The fisherman’s good fortune has come to an end. He and his wife are poor folks once more. In a Hesse variant the husband’s final wish is, “Let me be God, and my wife the Mother of God.” [30]

A curious parallel to one of the incidents in King Māndhātar’s story is afforded by a Polynesian myth. On the crown of King Utposhadha’s head, according to the Tibetan tale, “there grew a very soft tumour, somewhat resembling a cushion of cotton or wool, without doing him any harm. When it had become quite ripe and had broken, there came forth from it a boy, shapely and handsome.” Mr. Gill tells us in his interesting “Myths and Songs from the South Pacific” (p. 10), that Tangaroa and Rongo were the children of Vātea, the father of gods and men, and his wife Papa. “Tangaroa should have been born first, but gave precedence to his brother Rongo. A few days after the birth of Rongo, his mother Papa suffered from a very large boil on her arm. She resolved to get rid of it by pressing it. The core accordingly flew out; it was Tangaroa! Another account, equally veracious, says that Tangaroa came right up through Papa’s head. The precise spot is indicated by ‘the crown’ with which all their descendants have since been born.” Professor Schiefner mentions that a suggestion has been made to the effect that “the name of Utposhadha may be a transformation of the Greek Hephæstus, though the part which the latter plays in the Greek myth at the birth of Athene is of a different nature.” But this seems to be going unnecessarily far.

The story of Kuśa, No. 2, may be linked with the numerous European variants of the tale which we know so well under the title of “Beauty and the Beast.” The principal feature of that tale is the union of a beautiful maiden with a monster of some kind, whose monstrosity is eventually cured by her love and devotion. The Beast with whom the Beauty is linked is generally a supernatural monster, and possesses the power of at times divesting itself of its monstrous or bestial envelope or husk, and appearing in its real form as a fairy prince or other brilliant being. It is, as a general rule, only at night in the dark that this transformation takes place. In some cases, as in the Cupid and Psyche story, the wife is forbidden to look upon her husband. He visits her only in utter darkness. But in many versions of the story she is allowed to see her pseudo-monster in all his brilliant beauty. He is often a deity, whom some superior divinity has degraded from the sky and compelled to live upon earth under a monstrous shape. One day the wife lays her hands on her husband’s monstrous envelope or husk and destroys it. The spell being thus broken, the husband either flies away to heaven or remains living on earth in uninterrupted beauty.

In some of the European variants, the original idea having apparently been forgotten, the transformation appears not only grotesque but unreasonable. Thus in a Wallachian tale (Schott, No. 23), a princess is married to “a pumpkin,” or at least to a youth who is a pumpkin by day. Wishing to improve her husband, she one day puts him in the oven and bakes him, whereupon he disappears for ever. In a German story (Grimm, No. 127), a princess who has lost her way in a wood is induced to marry an iron stove. But the disfiguring “husk” is in most cases the hide or skin of some inferior animal, an ass, a monkey, a frog, or the like, or else the outside of a hideous man. Sometimes it is a brilliant female being who is after this fashion “translated.” Thus an Indian story [31] tells of a prince who was obliged to take a monkey as his wife. But when she liked she could slip out of her monkey skin and appear as a beautiful woman arrayed in the most magnificent apparel. She adjured her husband to take great care of her “husk” during her absence from it. But one day he burnt it, hoping to force her to be always beautiful. She shrieked “I burn!” and disappeared. In a Russian variant of the same story a prince is compelled to marry a frog, which is “held in a bowl” while the marriage service is being performed. But when it so pleases her, his frog-wife “flings off her skin and becomes a fair maiden.” One day he burns her “husk,” and she disappears. In the Tibetan story of Kuśa, the “Beast” is merely an ugly man disfigured by “the eighteen signs of uncomeliness.” [32] On that account it was decided that “he must never be allowed to approach his wife by daylight.” But she caught sight of him one day, and her suspicions were aroused. So she hid away a lighted lamp in her room, uncovered it suddenly when her husband was with her, shrieked out that he was a demon, and fled away. After a time, however, won by his military reputation, she said to herself, “As this youth Kuśa is excellently endowed with boldness and courage, why should I dislike him?” And straightway “she took a liking for him,” just as the Beauty of the fairy-tale did for the Beast. It may be worth noticing that the conch-shell which Kuśa sounds with such force that the ears of his enemies are shattered, and they are either killed or put to flight, finds a Russian parallel in the whistle employed by the brigand Solovei, or Nightingale, whom Ilya of Murom overcomes. In the builmas, or Russian metrical romances, he often figures; and when he sounds his whistle his enemies fall to the ground, nearly or quite dead.

No. 3, which chronicles some of the wise judgments of King Ādarśamukha, comprises two different stories—the first narrating the ingenuity with which the king satisfied the demands of a number of complainants without injuring the man who had involuntarily given rise to their complaints; the second describing a journey made by a traveller who was commissioned by various persons, animals, or other objects, passed by him on his way, to ask certain questions on his arrival at his destination. The latter story is one which is familiar to Eastern Europe. In one of its Russian variants a peasant hospitably receives an old beggar, who adopts him as his brother, and invites him to pay him a visit. On his way to the beggar’s home, he is appealed to by children, who say, “Christ’s brother, ask Christ whether we must suffer here long.” Later on, girls engaged in ladling water from one well into another beg him to ask the same question on their account. When he arrives at his journey’s end he becomes aware that his beggar friend is Christ himself; and he is informed that the children he had passed on the way had been cursed by their mothers while still unborn, and so were unable to enter Paradise; and the girls had, while they were alive, adulterated the milk they sold with water, and were therefore condemned to an eternal punishment resembling that of the Danaides (Afanasief, “Legendui,” No. 8). The judgments attributed in the Tibetan tale to King Ādarśamukha, and in another Tibetan work, the “Dsanglun” (as Professor Schiefner has remarked) to King Mdges-pa, form the subject of a story well known in Russia under the title of “Shemyakin Sud,” or “Shemyaka’s Judgment.” It exists there as a folk-tale, but it belongs to what may be called the chap-book literature of the country, and it is derived from literary sources. A variant given by Afanasief (“Skazki,” v., No. 19) closely resembles part of the Tibetan tale. A poor man borrowed from his rich brother a pair of oxen, with which he ploughed his plot of ground. Coming away from the field he met an old man, who asked to whom the oxen belonged. “To my brother,” was the reply. “Your brother is rich and stingy,” said the old man; “choose which you will, either his son shall die or his oxen.” The poor man thought and thought. He was sorry both for the oxen and for his brother’s son. At last he said, “Better let the oxen die.” “Be it as you wish,” said the old man. When the poor man reached his home the oxen suddenly fell down dead. The rich brother accused him of having worked them to death, and carried him off to the king. On his way to the king’s court the poor man, according to the chap-book version (“Skazki,” viii. p. 325), accidentally sat down upon a baby and killed it, and tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but only succeeded in crushing an old man whose son was taking him into the river for a bath. He had also had the misfortune to pull off a horse’s tail without meaning it. When summoned into court for all these involuntary offences, he took a stone in his pocket tied up in a handkerchief, and stealthily produced it when he was had up before the judge, saying to himself, “If the judge goes against me I will kill him with this.” The judge fancied that the stone was a bribe of a hundred roubles which the defendant wished to offer him; so he gave judgment in his favour in each case. The poor man was to keep his brother’s horse until its tail grew again, and to marry the woman whose child he had crushed, and to stand under the bridge from which he had jumped and allow the son of the man he had killed to jump off the bridge on to him. The owner of the horse, the husband of the woman, and the son of the crushed man were all glad to buy off the culprit whom they had brought up for judgment. The satirical turn of the story and the allusion to bribe-taking are characteristic features of the Russian variants of this well-known Eastern tale. The Russian story takes its title from the notorious injustice and oppression of Prince Demetrius Shemyaka, who blinded his cousin, Vasily II., Grand Prince of Moscow, and for a time usurped his throne. To this day an unjust legal decision is known as a Shemyaka judgment. But in the Eastern versions of the story, which are numerous, there is no mention of injustice; stupidity, however, is sometimes attributed by them to the judge. Thus in the Kathá Sarit Ságara [33] the story of Devabhúti tells how the excellent wife of the learned Brahman of that name “went into the kitchen garden to get vegetables, and saw a donkey belonging to a washerman eating them. So she took up a stick and ran after the donkey, and the animal fell into a pit as it was trying to escape and broke its hoof. When its master heard of that, he came in a passion and beat with a stick and kicked the Brahman woman. Accordingly she, being pregnant, had a miscarriage, but the washerman returned home with his donkey. Then her husband, hearing of it, came home after bathing, and, after seeing his wife, went in his distress and complained to the chief magistrate of the town. The foolish man immediately had the washerman, whose name was Balásura, brought before him, and, after hearing the pleadings of both parties, delivered this judgment: ‘Since the donkey’s hoof is broken, let the Bráhman carry the donkey’s load for the washerman until the donkey is again fit for work, and let the washerman make the Bráhman’s wife pregnant again, since he made her miscarry. Let this be the punishment of the two parties respectively.’ When the Bráhman heard this, he and his wife in their despair took poison and died. And when the king heard of it, he put to death that inconsiderate judge.”