The Lecherous Holy Man and the Maiden in the Box.

• Author: Reed, Carrie E.

INTRODUCTION

For many centuries, a story of beauty, lust, and trickery has circulated in India. It was long ago written down, later to be rechronicled time and time again, in a number of story collections, in many different Indian languages. It developed and spread through the lively folklore tradition, and even in the twentieth century there were at least fifteen known folk versions of it in far-flung parts of India. (1) According to prominent folklorists, it embodies motifs exclusive to India. (2) Although some aspects of the story do occur in more familiar, universal story cycles, such as "Cinderella," or "The Swan Maiden," the crucial motifs believed to be exclusively Indian are: a maiden placed in a container by a holy man, the maiden rescued by a royal personage, the substitution of a wild animal for the girl, and the duping of the holy man. In fact, these combined motifs are not exclusive to India. While "The Lecherous Holy Man and the Maiden in the Box" might not be a universal folktale type, it did travel and develop outside of India at a quite early date, since there is a Chinese classical language version of it in the ninth-century miscellany, Youyang zazu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (3) There are also several examples of modern Tibetan folktale versions, though these tales will not be the focus of the present paper.

There is enough evidence to conjecture that this story originated in India, but pinpointing the exact origins is not, in fact, essential to an appreciation of the parallels for this story in India and China. This sort of appreciation is important for students of early Chinese informal narrative for various reasons. Although it is believed that many Chinese stones and anecdotes derived from places other than China, (4) it is rare actually to find, and have the chance to study, a possible "source" story in India that did not obviously come to China through early Chinese Buddhist translations. In addition to the great intrinsic value and interest that lies in the study of Indian parallels for the ninth-century anecdote, a contrastive reading of the different early incarnations of this story, perhaps most importantly, highlights some of the required (or at least common) features of the nebulous genre of Tang-dynasty zhiguai [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("records of the strange"), invites speculation about the ways that vernacular oral and classical written traditions interweave, and also sheds a glimmer of light on issues of transmission of stories between cultures.

The author of the Chinese version of the tale, Duan Chengshi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (c. 800-c. 863), loved all things foreign and collected as much information about foreign people and places as he could, but he did not know of the existence of parallels to the "Maiden in the Box" story. It is likely that he recorded a story circulating orally in China and that, as far as he was concerned, the events in it actually happened in China, to historical people. A reading of the Chinese anecdote and its Indian parallels shows that whenever and wherever it arrived in China, the story was transformed, taking on Chinese protagonists and Chinese settings. It was molded to current zhiguai anecdote conventions, and its focus and ostensible purpose were altered.

This paper will first present a translation of one of the extant early written Indian versions of the story. Next we shall briefly survey the textual context of the Indian narratives, to substantiate the notion that the tale originated in India. This will be followed by an examination of Duan Chengshi's principles of collection, and a translation of the Chinese tale. We will end with a brief comparison and discussion of the tales and their significance.

KATHASARITSAGARA VERSION

The earliest extant Indian version that I have seen of "The Lecherous Holy Man and the Maiden in the Box" is from the Sanskrit Kathasaritsagara, the "Ocean of the Sea of Story," a vast collection of tales that was compiled around 1070 by the Kashmiri Saivite Brahmin write Somadeva, to be presented to the Kashmiri queen Suryavati. (5)

The story of the girl and the holy man is found as one of a long string of emboxed stories that moves in, out of, and around a main narrative that winds ceaselessly along for thousands of pages, (6) somewhat in the manner of the tales of Sheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights. The primary narrative follows the amorous adventures of Prince Naravahanadatta, as he woos several dozen beautiful women, making political alliances along the way. The particular context for our side-tale (several subsidiary tales removed from the main narrative) involves a minister trying to get his sovereign to trick a neighboring king into giving him his daughter in a marriage alliance. The advisor to the king is skeptical about the proposed plan and tells the following story as an example of how one may be made to look a fool when one tries to play a dirty trick in order to obtain a woman. The translation below is C. H. Tawney's 1927 rendering. (7)

Story of the Hypocritical Ascetic On the bank of the Ganges there is a city named Makandika; in that city long ago there was a certain ascetic who observed a vow of silence, and he lived on alms, and, surrounded by numerous other holy beggars, dwelt in a monastery within the precincts of a god's temple where he had taken up his abode. Once, when he had entered a certain merchant's house to beg, he saw a beautiful maiden coming out with alms in her hand and the rascal, seeing that she was wonderfully beautiful, was smitten with love, and exclaimed: "Ah! Ah! Alas!" And that merchant over heard him. Then, taking the alms he had received, he departed to his own house; and then the merchant went there and said to him in his astonishment: "Why did you today suddenly break your vow of silence and say what you did?" When he heard that, the ascetic said to the merchant: "This daughter of yours has inauspicious marks; when she marries, you will undoubtedly perish, wife, sons and all. So, when I saw her, I was afflicted, for you are my devoted adherent; and thus it was on your account that I broke silence and said what I did. So place this daughter of yours by night in a basket, on the top of which there must be a light, and set her adrift on the Ganges." The merchant said, "So I will," and went away; and at night he did all that he had been directed to do, out of pure fear. The timid are ever unreflecting. The hermit for his part said at that time to his own pupils: "Go to the Ganges, and when you see a basket floating along with a light on the top of it, bring it here secretly, but you must not open it, even if you hear a noise inside." They said, "We will do so," and off they went; but before they reached the Ganges, strange to say, a certain prince went into the river to bathe. He, seeing that basket, which the merchant had thrown in, by the help of the light on it, got his servants to fetch it for him, and immediately opened it out of curiosity. And in it he saw that heart-enchanting girl, and he married her, on the spot by the gandkarva ceremony of marriage. (8) And he set the basket adrift on the Ganges, exactly as it was before, putting a lamp on the top of it, and placing a fierce monkey inside it. The prince having departed with that pearl of maidens, the pupils of the hermit came there in the course of their search, and saw that basket, and took it up and carried it to the hermit. Then he, being delighted, said to them: "I will take this upstairs and perform incantations with it alone, but you must lie in silence this night." When he had said this, the ascetic took the basket to the top of the monastery and opened it, eager to behold the merchant's daughter. And then a monkey of terrible appearance sprang out of it, and rushed upon the ascetic, like his own immoral conduct incarnate in bodily form. The monkey in its fury immediately tore off with its teeth the nose of the wicked ascetic, and his ears with its claws, as if it had been a skillful executioner; and in that state the ascetic ran downstairs, and when his pupils beheld him they could with difficulty suppress their laughter. And early next morning everybody heard the story, and laughed heartily; but the merchant was delighted, and his daughter also, as she had obtained a good husband. According to Maurice Bloomfield, our "Maiden in the Box" story appears also in the eleventh-century Brhatkathamanjari by another Kashmiri chronicler, Ksemendra (fl. 1037). (9) The Brhatkathamanjari, written slightly earlier than the Kathasaritsagara, tells the same main narrative frame story and includes most of the accessory tales (of which our tale is one) but in slightly more abridged form than in the Kathasaritsagara. (10) The next extant version that I have seen appears in the fifteenth-century Kathakosa, a Sanskrit collection of connected and emboxed stories that illustrates and teaches the tenets of Jainism. (11) This version is slightly different in its details than the two tenth-century versions, but it contains all of the major identifying motifs.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT OF THE EARLIEST EXTANT INDIAN VERSIONS

Strictly speaking, the earliest extant "Maiden in the Box" story is the ninth-century Chinese version by Duan Chengshi, yet it is very likely that the tale originated in India and that the extant Indic texts represent late versions of significantly earlier oral and written accounts. The tenth- and eleventh-century collections Kathasaritsagara and Brhatkathamanjari are said to be recensions of an ancient, lost tome, known as the Brhatkatha, or "Great Story." There is much that is not known about this work, but it was ostensibly written by a man named Gunadhya, in a mysterious language known as Paisaci. (12) One of the many excellent studies of the Brhatkatha and its descendants is Donald Nelson's "Brhatkatha Studies: The Problem of an r Text," (13) which provides a...