Panchatantra - 'Five Principles'

[KALKI]

verse and prose, in a frame story format. The original Sanskrit work, which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE,[ is attributed to Vishnu Sharma. However, it is based on older oral traditions, including "animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine".

It is "certainly the most frequently translated literary product of India", and these stories are among the most widely known in the world. To quote Edgerton (1924)

…there are recorded over two hundred different versions known to exist in more than fifty languages, and three-fourths of these languages are extra-Indian. As early as the eleventh century this work reached Europe, and before 1600 it existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, Czech, and perhaps other Slavonic languages.

Its range has extended from Java to Iceland… [In India,] it has been worked over and over again, expanded, abstracted, turned into verse, retold in prose, translated into medieval and modern vernaculars, and retranslated into Sanskrit. And most of the stories contained in it have "gone down" into the folklore of the story-loving Hindus, whence they reappear in the collections of oral tales gathered by modern students of folk-stories.

Thus it goes by many names in many cultures. In India itself, it had at least 25 recensions, including the Sanskrit Tantrākhyāyikā[6] (Sanskrit: तन्त्राख्यायिका) and inspired the Hitopadesha. It was translated into Pahlavi in 570 CE by Borzūya.

This became the basis for a Syriac translation as Kalilag and Damnag and a translation into Arabic in 750 CE by Persian scholar Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa as Kalīlah wa Dimnah[8] (Arabic: كليلة و دمنة‎). A Persian version from the 12th century became known as Kalila and Dimna (Persian: کلیله و دمنه). Other names include Kalīleh o Demneh or Anvār-e Soheylī (Persian: انوار سهیلی, 'The Lights of Canopus') or The Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpai, in various European languages) or The Morall Philosophie of Doni (English, 1570).

[KALKI]

Borzuy's 570 CE Pahlavi translation (Kalile va Demne, now lost) was soon translated into Syriac, and nearly two centuries later into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa around 750 CE under the Arabic title, Kalīla wa Dimma.

After the Muslim invasion of Persia (Iran) Ibn al-Muqaffa's version (by now two languages removed from its pre-Islamic Sanskrit original) emerges as the pivotal surviving text that enriches world literature.

Ibn al-Muqqaffa's work is considered a model of the finest Arabic prose style,and "is considered the first masterpiece of Arabic literary prose."

Some scholars believe that Ibn al-Muqaffa's translation of the second section, illustrating the Sanskrit principle of Mitra Laabha (Gaining Friends), became the unifying basis for the Brethren of Purity (Ikwhan al-Safa) — the anonymous 9th century CE Arab encyclopedists whose prodigious literary effort, Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Sincerity, codified Indian, Persian and Greek knowledge. A suggestion made by Goldziher, and later written on by Philip K. Hitti in his History of the Arabs, proposes that "The appellation is presumably taken from the story of the ringdove in Kalilah wa-Dimnah in which it is related that a group of animals by acting as faithful friends (ikhwan al-safa) to one another escaped the snares of the hunter." This story is mentioned as an exemplum when the Brethren speak of mutual aid in one risaala (treatise), a crucial part of their system of ethics.

[KALKI]

Almost all pre-modern European translations of the Panchatantra arise from this Arabic version. From Arabic it was re-translated into Syriac in the 10th or 11th century, into Greek in 1080, into 'modern' Persian by Abu'l Ma'ali Nasr Allah Munshi in 1121, and in 1252 into Spain (old Castilian, Calyla e Dymna).

Perhaps most importantly, it was translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Joel in the 12th century. This Hebrew version was translated into Latin by John of Capua as Directorium Humanae Vitae, or "Directory of Human Life", and printed in 1480, and became the source of most European versions. A German translation, Das Der Buch Beyspiele, of the Panchatantra was printed in 1483, making this one of the earliest books to be printed by Gutenberg's press after the Bible.

The Latin version was translated into Italian by Antonio Francisco Doni in 1552. This translation became the basis for the first English translation, in 1570: Sir Thomas North translated it into Elizabethan English as The Fables of Bidpai: The Morall Philosophie of Doni (reprinted by Joseph Jacobs, 1888).

La Fontaine published The Fables of Bidpai in 1679, based on "the Indian sage Pilpay".

[KALKI]

The work has gone through many different versions and translations from the sixth century to the present day.

The original Indian version was first translated into a foreign language by Borzūya in 570, then into Arabic in 750, and this became the source of all European versions, until Charles Wilkins's translation of the Sanskrit Hitopadesha in 1787.

[KALKI]

The Panchatantra is an inter-woven series of colourful fables, many of which involve animals exhibiting animal stereotypes.

According to its own narrative, it illustrates, for the benefit of three ignorant princes, the central Hindu principles of nīti.

While nīti is hard to translate, it roughly means prudent worldly conduct, or "the wise conduct of life".

Apart from a short introduction — in which the author, Vishnu Sarma, is introduced as narrating the rest of the work to the princes — it consists of five parts. Each part contains a main story, called the frame story, which in turn contains several stories "emboxed" in it, as one character narrates a story to another. Often these stories contain further emboxed stories.

The stories thus operate like a succession of Russian dolls, one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four deep. Besides the stories, the characters also quote various epigrammatic verses to make their point.

The five books are called:

Mitra-bheda: The Separation of Friends (The Lion and the Bull)
Mitra-lābha or Mitra-samprāpti: The Gaining of Friends (The Dove, Crow, Mouse, Tortoise and Deer)
Kākolūkīyam: Of Crows and Owls (War and Peace)
Labdhapraṇāśam: Loss Of Gains (The Monkey and the Crocodile)
Aparīkṣitakārakaṃ: Ill-Considered Action / Rash deeds (The Brahman and the Mongoose)