I have become quite intrigued by the portrait of animals in children’s literature, but especially the use of animal stories to convey lessons in morality and ethics or the learning of specific virtues or moral emotions (the latter often include a cognitive component or rational element). I don’t think that this is the only or even primary way children are socialized into morality and later ethical life, indeed, I suspect imitation and learning by example (in families and communities) are likely, at least in the beginning, to be decisive; in which case such stories may play a unique role in making the child at once more reflective and imaginative, awakening, for instance, what we can call moral emotions like guilt and shame, sympathy, compassion, empathy, what Mark Rowlands terms “moral emotions of care and concern,” as well as shaping or constraining dispositionally “dangerous” or fraught emotions like anger, rage, envy, and spite. Such stories may simply yet no less importantly reinforce or fill out other means of moral awakening, imagination, and socialization. In a moral psychological and perhaps epistemic sense, they can be the seeds of personal identity in conjunction with moments of incipient self-examination. These stories may exist as one side of a model or form of mutual literary reinforcement that includes the learning of, say, popular proverbs, adages, and aphorisms (maxims, however, such as those written by the French moralists, are more suitable to those well past the ‘age of reason’ in a developmental sense), some of which may be found in the tales themselves.
In particular, and speaking for myself, Aesop’s Fables, the Jātaka tales in Buddhism (some of these tales pre-date Buddhism in Indic culture), and the Indic Pañcatantra stand apart. The Jātaka tales involve previous (re-)birth stories of the Buddha, these births being of both animal and eventually human form. I was provoked to consider such stories afresh, oddly enough, not only because I cannot recall learning (neither hearing nor reading) them as a child (indeed, I learned of them only later as a parent when, along with my spouse, reading them to our children!), but as a result of my recent study of philosophical arguments (and scientific evidence) explaining how animals behave or act morally, or at least express moral attitudes or emotions (e.g., sympathy, compassion, care, concern or solicitude, and grief). Some people would dismiss such philosophical arguments (even if they enjoy and appreciate the morals or ‘truths’ of the aforementioned bodies of literature) as mired in illicit personification or anthropomorphism and yet increasing scientific evidence testifies otherwise, in addition to having been endorsed by philosophers who’ve found deflationary behaviorist and decidedly non-moral explanations unpersuasive even if still (hypothetically) plausible. One reason arguments here cannot be judged conclusive in the sense of eliminating once-and-for-all counter-arguments is that the hypotheses and theories of the principal parties rest on different presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions, thus they may exhibit (more or less) internal consistency and coherence which is liable to appear weaker in face of counter-arguments, that is, from the outside-looking-in as it were.
These classical stories (fables and tales), not surprisingly, are frequently described as involving “metaphors of anthropomorphized animals with human virtues and vices.” That may, sometimes, and strictly speaking, be true, yet the qualification is necessary because it now appears that different species of animals display, as “moral subjects” (distinguished from ‘moral patients’ on the one hand, and ‘moral agents’ on the other) what Rowlands calls “moral emotions” in his brilliant and pathbreaking book, Can Animals Be Moral? (Oxford University Press, 2012).
The three summaries below are edited versions of the respective Wikipedia entries. The last entry on the Pañcatantra contains a helpful discussion of the possible if not probable relations and influences that exist between these three bodies of “classical” fables and tales.
“The Jātaka tales are a voluminous body of literature native to India concerning the previous births of Gautama Buddha in both human and animal form. The future Buddha may appear as a king, an outcast, a god, an elephant—but, in whatever form, he exhibits some virtue that the tale thereby inculcates. Often, Jātaka tales include an extensive cast of characters who interact and get into various kinds of trouble—whereupon the Buddha character intervenes to resolve all the problems and bring about a happy ending.
In Theravada Buddhism, the Jātakas are a textual division of the Pāli Canon, included in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka. The term Jātaka may also refer to a traditional commentary on this book. The tales are dated between 300 BC and 400 AD. Mahāsāṃghika Caitika sects from the Āndhra region took the Jātakas as canonical literature and are known to have rejected some of the Theravāda Jātakas which dated past the time of King Ashoka. The Caitikas claimed that their own Jātakas represented the original collection before the Buddhist tradition split into various lineages.
According to A. K. Warder, the Jātakas are the precursors to the various legendary biographies of the Buddha, which were composed at later dates. Although many Jātakas were written from an early period, which describe previous lives of the Buddha, very little biographical material about Gautama’s own life has been recorded.
The Jātaka-Mālā of Arya Śura in Sanskrit gives 34 Jātaka stories. At the Ajanta Caves, Jātaka scenes are inscribed with quotes from Arya Shura, with script datable to the sixth century. It had already been translated into Chinese in 434 CE. Borobudur contains depictions of all 34 Jatakas from Jataka Mala.”
“Aesop’s Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
The fables originally belonged to the oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.
Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmission, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop’s fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world.
Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from the Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:
‘like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.’
Earlier still, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that ‘Aesop the fable writer’ was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE. Among references in other writers, Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the ‘absurdities’ of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his time in prison turning some of Aesop’s fables ‘which he knew’ into verses. Nonetheless, for two main reasons, because numerous morals within Aesop’s attributed fables appear to contradict each other, and because ancient accounts of Aesop’s life contradict each other, the modern view is that Aesop was not the originator of all those fables attributed to him. Instead, any fable tended to be ascribed to the name of Aesop if there was no known alternative literary source.
In Classical times there were various theorists who tried to differentiate these fables from other kinds of narration. They had to be short and unaffected; in addition, they are fictitious, useful to life and true to nature. In them could be found talking animals and plants, although humans interacting only with humans figure in a few. Typically they might begin with a contextual introduction, followed by the story, often with the moral underlined at the end. Setting the context was often necessary as a guide to the story’s interpretation, as in the case of the political meaning of The Frogs Who Desired a King and The Frogs and the Sun.
Sometimes the titles given later to the fables have become proverbial, as in the case of killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs or the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. In fact some fables, such as The Young Man and the Swallow, appear to have been invented as illustrations of already existing proverbs. One theorist, indeed, went so far as to define fables as extended proverbs. In this they have an aetiological function, the explaining of origins such as, in another context, why the ant is a mean, thieving creature or how the tortoise got its shell. Other fables, also verging on this function, are outright jokes, as in the case of The Old Woman and the Doctor, aimed at greedy practitioners of medicine.
The apparent contradictions between fables already mentioned and alternative versions of much the same fable, as in the case of The Woodcutter and the Trees, are best explained by the ascription to Aesop of all examples of the genre. Some are demonstrably of West Asian origin, others have analogues further to the East. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of Aesopic form existing in both ancient Sumer and Akkad, as early as the third millennium BCE. Aesop’s fables and stories from Indian traditions, for instance the Buddhist Jātaka tales and the Hindu Pañcatantra, share about a dozen tales in common, although often widely differing in detail. There is some debate over whether the Greeks learned these fables from Indian storytellers or the other way, or if the influences were mutual.
Loeb editor Ben E. Perry took the extreme position in his book Babrius and Phaedrus (1965) that ‘in the entire Greek tradition there is not, so far as I can see, a single fable that can be said to come either directly or indirectly from an Indian source; but many fables or fable-motifs that first appear in Greek or Near Eastern literature are found later in the Panchatantra and other Indian story-books, including the Buddhist Jatakas.’ Although Aesop and the Buddha were near contemporaries, the stories of neither were recorded in writing until some centuries after their death. Few disinterested scholars would now be prepared to make so absolute a stand as Perry about their origin in view of the conflicting and still emerging evidence.
When and how the fables arrived in and travelled from ancient Greece remains uncertain. Some cannot be dated any earlier than Babrius and Phaedrus, several centuries after Aesop, and yet others even later. The earliest mentioned collection was by Demetrius of Phalerum, an Athenian orator and statesman of the 4th century BCE, who compiled the fables into a set of ten books for the use of orators. A follower of Aristotle, he simply catalogued all the fables that earlier Greek writers had used in isolation as exempla, putting them into prose. At least it was evidence of what was attributed to Aesop by others; but this may have included any ascription to him from the oral tradition in the way of animal fables, fictitious anecdotes, etiological or satirical myths, possibly even any proverb or joke, that these writers transmitted. It is more a proof of the power of Aesop’s name to attract such stories to it than evidence of his actual authorship. In any case, although the work of Demetrius was mentioned frequently for the next twelve centuries, and was considered the official Aesop, no copy now survives. Present day collections evolved from the later Greek version of Babrius, of which there now exists an incomplete manuscript of some 160 fables in choliambic verse. Current opinion is that he lived in the 1st century CE. The version of 55 fables in choliambic tetrameters by the 9th century Ignatius the Deacon is also worth mentioning for its early inclusion of tales from Oriental sources.
Further light is thrown on the entry of Oriental stories into the Aesopic canon by their appearance in Jewish sources such as the Talmud and in Midrashic literature. [….] Where similar fables exist in Greece, India, and in the Talmud, the Talmudic form approaches more nearly the Indian. Thus, the fable ‘The Wolf and the Crane’ is told in India of a lion and another bird. When Joshua ben Hananiah told that fable to the Jews, to prevent their rebelling against Rome and once more putting their heads into the lion’s jaws (Gen. R. lxiv.), he shows familiarity with some form derived from India.
The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin iambic trimeters was performed by Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus in the 1st century CE, although at least one fable had already been translated by the poet Ennius two centuries before, and others are referred to in the work of Horace. The rhetorician Aphthonius of Antioch wrote a technical treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some forty of these fables in 315. It is notable as illustrating contemporary and later usage of fables in rhetorical practice. Teachers of philosophy and rhetoric often set the fables of Aesop as an exercise for their scholars, inviting them not only to discuss the moral of the tale, but also to practise style and the rules of grammar by making new versions of their own. A little later the poet Ausonius handed down some of these fables in verse, which the writer Julianus Titianus translated into prose, and in the early 5th century Avianus put 42 of these fables into Latin elegiacs.
The largest, oldest known and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus bears the name of an otherwise unknown fabulist named Romulus. It contains 83 fables, dates from the 10th century and seems to have been based on an earlier prose version which, under the name of ‘Aesop’ and addressed to one Rufus, may have been written in the Carolingian period or even earlier. The collection became the source from which, during the second half of the Middle Ages, almost all the collections of Latin fables in prose and verse were wholly or partially drawn. A version of the first three books of Romulus in elegiac verse, possibly made around the 12th century, was one of the most highly influential texts in medieval Europe. Referred to variously (among other titles) as the verse Romulus or elegiac Romulus, and ascribed to Gualterus Anglicus, it was a common Latin teaching text and was popular well into the Renaissance. Another version of Romulus in Latin elegiacs was made by Alexander Neckam, born at St Albans in 1157.
Interpretive ‘translations’ of the elegiac Romulus were very common in Europe in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest was one in the 11th century by Ademar of Chabannes, which includes some new material. This was followed by a prose collection of parables by the Cistercian preacher Odo of Cheriton around 1200 where the fables (many of which are not Aesopic) are given a strong medieval and clerical tinge. This interpretive tendency, and the inclusion of yet more non-Aesopic material, was to grow as versions in the various European vernaculars began to appear in the following centuries.
With the revival of literary Latin during the Renaissance, authors began compiling collections of fables in which those traditionally by Aesop and those from other sources appeared side by side. One of the earliest was by Lorenzo Bevilaqua, also known as Laurentius Abstemius, who wrote 197 fables, the first hundred of which were published as Hecatomythium in 1495. Little by Aesop was included. At the most, some traditional fables are adapted and reinterpreted: The Lion and the Mouse is continued and given a new ending (fable 52); The Oak and the Reed becomes ‘The Elm and the Willow’ (53); The Ant and the Grasshopper is adapted as ‘The Gnat and the Bee’ (94) with the difference that the gnat offers to teach music to the bee’s children. There are also Mediaeval tales such as The Mice in Council (195) and stories created to support popular proverbs such as ‘Still Waters Run Deep’ (5) and ‘A woman, an ass and a walnut tree’ (65), where the latter refers back to Aesop’s fable of The Walnut Tree. Most of the fables in Hecatomythium were later translated in the second half of Roger L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and other eminent mythologists (1692); some also appeared among the 102 in H. Clarke’s Latin reader, Select fables of Aesop: with an English translation (1787), of which there were both English and American editions. [….]
Until the 18th century the fables were largely put to adult use by teachers, preachers, speech-makers and moralists. It was the philosopher John Locke who first seems to have advocated targeting children as a special audience in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Aesop's fables, in his opinion are
‘apt to delight and entertain a child . . . yet afford useful reflection to a grown man. And if his memory retain them all his life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly thoughts and serious business. If his Aesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much better, and encourage him to read when it carries the increase of knowledge with it For such visible objects children hear talked of in vain, and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no ideas of them; those ideas being not to be had from sounds, but from the things themselves, or their pictures.’
That young people are a special target for the fables was not a particularly new idea and a number of ingenious schemes for catering to that audience had already been put into practice in Europe. The Centum Fabulae of Gabriele Faerno was commissioned by Pope Pius IV in the 16th century ‘so that children might learn, at the same time and from the same book, both moral and linguistic purity.’ When King Louis XIV of France wanted to instruct his six-year-old son, he incorporated the series of hydraulic statues representing 38 chosen fables in the labyrinth of Versailles in the 1670s. In this he had been advised by Charles Perrault, who was later to translate Faerno’s widely published Latin poems into French verse and so bring them to a wider audience. Then in the 1730s appeared the eight volumes of Nouvelles Poésies Spirituelles et Morales sur les plus beaux airs, the first six of which incorporated a section of fables specifically aimed at children. In this the fables of La Fontaine were rewritten to fit popular airs of the day and arranged for simple performance. The preface to this work comments that ‘we consider ourselves happy if, in giving them an attraction to useful lessons which are suited to their age, we have given them an aversion to the profane songs which are often put into their mouths and which only serve to corrupt their innocence.’ The work was popular and reprinted into the following century. [….]
The Pañcatantra (Sanskrit: पञ्चतन्त्र, ‘Five Treatise’ is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. The surviving work is dated to about 200 BCE, but the fables are likely much more ancient. The text’s author is unknown, but it has been attributed to Vishnu Sharma in some recensions and Vasubhaga in others, both of which may be fictitious pen names. It is likely a Hindu text, and based on older oral traditions with ’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. It goes by many names in many cultures. There is a version of Pañcatantra in nearly every major language of India, and in addition there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world. One version reached Europe in the 11th century. To quote Edgerton (1924):
‘… 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.’
The earliest known translation into a non-Indian language is in Middle Persian (Pahlavi, 550 CE) by Burzoe. 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. A New Persian version by Rudaki, from the 3rd century Hijri, became known as Kalīleh o Demneh. Rendered in prose by Abu’l-Ma’ali Nasrallah Monshi in 1143 CE, this was the basis of Kashefi’s 15th century Anvār-i Suhaylī (The Lights of Canopus), which in turn was translated into Humayun-namah in Turkish. The book is also known as The Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpai in various European languages, Vidyapati in Sanskrit) or The Morall Philosophie of Doni (English, 1570). Most European versions of the text are derivative works of the 12th century Hebrew version of Pañcatantra by Rabbi Joel. In Germany, its translation in 1480 by Anton von Pforr [de] has been widely read. Several versions of the text are also found in Indonesia, where it is titled as Tantri Kamandaka, Tantravakya or Candapingala and consists of 360 fables. In Laos, a version is called Nandaka-prakarana, while in Thailand it has been referred to as Nang Tantrai.
The prelude section of the Pañcatantra identifies an octogenarian Brahmin named Vishnusharma (Viṣṇuśarman) as its author. He is stated to be teaching the principles of good government to three princes of Amarasakti. It is unclear, states Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian religions, if Vishnusharma was a real person or himself a literary invention. Some South Indian recensions of the text, as well as Southeast Asian versions of Pañcatantra attribute the text to Vasubhaga, states Olivelle. Based on the content and mention of the same name in other texts dated to ancient and medieval era centuries, most scholars agree that Vishnusharma is a fictitious name. Olivelle and other scholars state that regardless of who the author was, it is likely ‘the author was a Hindu, and not a Buddhist, nor Jain,’ but it is unlikely that the author was a devotee of Hindu god Vishnu because the text neither expresses any sentiments against other Hindu deities such as Shiva, Indra and others, nor does it avoid invoking them with reverence.
Various locations where the text was composed have been proposed but this has been controversial. Some of the proposed locations include Kashmir, Southwestern or South India. The text’s original language was likely Sanskrit. Though the text is now known as Pañcatantra, the title found in old manuscript versions varies regionally, and includes names such as Tantrakhyayika, Panchakhyanaka, Panchakhyana and Tantropakhyana. The suffix akhyayika and akhyanaka mean ‘little story’ or ‘little story book’ in Sanskrit.
The text was translated into Pahlavi in 550 CE, which forms the latest limit of the text’s existence. The earliest limit is uncertain. It quotes identical verses from Arthasastra, which is broadly accepted to have been completed by the early centuries of the common era. According to Olivelle, ‘the current scholarly consensus places the Pañcatantra around 300 CE, although we should remind ourselves that this is only an educated guess.’ The text quotes from older genre of Indian literature, and legends with anthropomorphic animals are found in more ancient texts dated to the early centuries of the 1st millennium BCE such as the chapter 4.1 of the Chandogya Upanishad. According to Gillian Adams, Pañcatantra may be a product of the Vedic period, but its age cannot be ascertained with confidence because ‘the original Sanskrit version has been lost.’ [….]
The Pañcatantra is a series of inter-woven fables, many of which deploy metaphors of anthropomorphized animals with human virtues and vices. Its narrative 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, it consists of five parts. Each part contains a main story, called the frame story, which in turn contains several embedded stories, as one character narrates a story to another. Often these stories contain further embedded stories. The stories 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 have their own subtitles. [….]
The fables of Pañcatantra are found in numerous world languages. It is also considered partly the origin of European secondary works, such as folk tale motifs found in Boccaccio, La Fontaine and the works of Grimm Brothers. For a while, this had led to the hypothesis that popular worldwide animal-based fables had origins in India and the Middle East. According to Max Muller, ‘Sanskrit literature is very rich in fables and stories; no other literature can vie with it in that respect; nay, it is extremely likely that fables, in particular animal fables, had their principal source in India.’
This mono-causal hypothesis has now been generally discarded in favor of polygenetic hypothesis which states that fable motifs had independent origins in many ancient human cultures, some of which have common roots and some influenced by co-sharing of fables. The shared fables implied morals that appealed to communities separated by large distances and these fables were therefore retained, transmitted over human generations with local variations. However, many post-medieval era authors explicitly credit their inspirations to texts such as ‘Bidpai’ and ‘Pilpay, the Indian sage’ that are known to be based on the Pañcatantra.
According to Niklas Bengtsson, even though India being the exclusive original source of fables is no longer taken seriously, the ancient classic Pañcatantra, ‘which new folklore research continues to illuminate, was certainly the first work ever written down for children, and this in itself means that the Indian influence has been enormous [on world literature], not only on the genres of fables and fairy tales, but on those genres as taken up in children’s literature.’ According to Adams and Bottigheimer, the fables of Pañcatantra are known in at least 38 languages around the world in 112 versions by Jacob’s old estimate, and its relationship with Mesopotamian and Greek fables is hotly debated in part because the original manuscripts of all three ancient texts have not survived. Olivelle states that there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world, in addition to a version in nearly every major language of India.
Scholars have noted the strong similarity between a few of the stories in the Pañcatantra and Aesop’s Fables. Examples are The Ass in the Panther’s Skin and The Ass without Heart and Ears. The Broken Pot is similar to Aesop’s The Milkmaid and Her Pail, The Gold-Giving Snake is similar to Aesop’s The Man and the Serpent and Le Paysan et Dame serpent by Marie de France (Fables). Other well-known stories include The Tortoise and The Geese and The Tiger, the Brahmin and the Jackal. Similar animal fables are found in most cultures of the world, although some folklorists view India as the prime source. [….] The French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine acknowledged his indebtedness to the work in the introduction to his Second Fables: ‘This is a second book of fables that I present to the public.... I have to acknowledge that the greatest part is inspired from Pilpay, an Indian Sage.’ The Pañcatantra is the origin also of several stories in Arabian Nights, Sindbad, and of many Western nursery rhymes and ballads.
In the Indian tradition, The Pañcatantra is a nītiśāstra. Nīti can be roughly translated as ‘the wise conduct of life’ and a śāstra is a technical or scientific treatise; thus it is considered a treatise on political science and human conduct. Its literary sources are thus ‘the expert tradition of political science and the folk and literary traditions of storytelling.’ It draws from the Dharma and Artha śāstras, quoting them extensively. It is also explained that nīti ‘represents an admirable attempt to answer the insistent question how to win the utmost possible joy from life in the world of men’ and that nīti is ‘the harmonious development of the powers of man, a life in which security, prosperity, resolute action, friendship, and good learning are so combined to produce joy.’
The Pañcatantra shares many stories in common with the Buddhist Jātaka tales, purportedly told by the historical Buddha before his death around 400 BCE. As the scholar Patrick Olivelle writes, ‘It is clear that the Buddhists did not invent the stories. [....] It is quite uncertain whether the author of [the Pañcatantra] borrowed his stories from the Jātakas or the Mahābhārata, or whether he was tapping into a common treasury of tales, both oral and literary, of ancient India.’ Many scholars believe the tales were based on earlier oral folk traditions, which were finally written down, although there is no conclusive evidence. In the early 20th century, W. Norman Brown found that many folk tales in India appeared to be borrowed from literary sources and not vice versa. [….]
According to Olivelle, ‘… the current scholarly debate regarding the intent and purpose of the Pañcatantra — whether it supports unscrupulous Machiavellian politics or demands ethical conduct from those holding high office — underscores the rich ambiguity of the text.’ Konrad Meisig states that the Pañcatantra has been incorrectly represented by some as ‘an entertaining textbook for the education of princes in the Machiavellian rules of Arthasastra,’ but instead it is a book for the ‘Little Man’ to develop ‘Niti’ (social ethics, prudent behavior, shrewdness) in their pursuit of Artha, and a work on social satire. According to Joseph Jacobs, ‘... if one thinks of it, the very raison d’être of the Fable is to imply its moral without mentioning it.’
The Pañcatantra, states Patrick Olivelle, [is a wonderful] … collection of delightful stories with pithy proverbs, ageless and practical wisdom; one of its appeal and success is that it is a complex book that ‘does not reduce the complexities of human life, government policy, political strategies, and ethical dilemmas into simple solutions; it can and does speak to different readers at different levels.’ [….]
The Sanskrit version of the Pañcatantra text gives names to the animal characters, but these names are creative with double meanings. The names connote the character observable in nature but also map a human personality that a reader can readily identify. For example, the deer characters are presented as a metaphor for the charming, innocent, peaceful and tranquil personality who is a target for those who seek a prey to exploit, while the crocodile is presented to symbolize dangerous intent hidden beneath a welcoming ambiance (waters of a lotus flower-laden pond). Dozens of different types of wildlife found in India are thus named, and they constitute an array of symbolic characters in the Pañcatantra. Thus, the names of the animals evoke layered meaning that resonates with the reader, and the same story can be read at different levels.
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 (Pahlavi) by Borzūya in 570 CE, then into Arabic in 750. This Arabic version was translated into several languages, including Syriac, Greek, Persian, Hebrew and Spanish, and thus became the source of versions in European languages, until the English translation by Charles Wilkins of the Sanskrit Hitopadesha in 1787.
The Pañcatantra approximated its current literary form within the 4th–6th centuries CE, though originally written around 200 BCE. No Sanskrit texts before 1000 CE have survived. Buddhist monks on pilgrimage to India took the influential Sanskrit text (probably both in oral and literary formats) north to Tibet and China and east to South East Asia. This led to versions in all Southeast Asian countries, including Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, Javanese and Lao derivatives. [….]
It was the Pañcatantra that served as the basis for the studies of Theodor Benfey, the pioneer in the field of comparative literature. His efforts began to clear up some confusion surrounding the history of the Pañcatantra, culminating in the works of Hertel and Edgerton. Hertel discovered several recensions in India, in particular the oldest available Sanskrit recension, the Tantrakhyayika in Kashmir, and the so-called North Western Family Sanskrit text by the Jain monk Purnabhadra in 1199 CE that blends and rearranges at least three earlier versions. Edgerton undertook a minute study of all texts which seemed ’to provide useful evidence on the lost Sanskrit text to which, it must be assumed, they all go back,’ and believed he had reconstructed the original Sanskrit Pañcatantra; this version is known as the Southern Family text.
Among modern translations, Arthur W. Ryder’s translation (1925), translating prose for prose and verse for rhyming verse, remains popular. In the 1990s two English versions of the Pañcatantra were published, Chandra Rajan’s translation (like Ryder’s, based on Purnabhadra’s recension) by Penguin (1993), and Patrick Olivelle’s translation (based on Edgerton’s reconstruction of the ur-text) by Oxford University Press (1997). Olivelle’s translation was republished in 2006 by the Clay Sanskrit Library. [….]
The novelist Doris Lessing notes in her introduction to Ramsay Wood’s 1980 ‘retelling’ of the first two of the five Pañcatantra books, that
‘… it is safe to say that most people in the West these days will not have heard of it, while they will certainly at the very least have heard of the Upanishads and the Vedas. Until comparatively recently, it was the other way around. Anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai or the Tales of Kalila and Dimna — these being the most commonly used titles with us — was a great Eastern classic. There were at least twenty English translations in the hundred years before 1888. Pondering on these facts leads to reflection on the fate of books, as chancy and unpredictable as that of people or nations.’”
