Text · frame-story collection
Pañcatantra
Also known as Panchatantra, Pancatantra, Vishnu Sharma, Tantrakhyayika
Five books of animal fables inside a frame, attributed to Vishnu Sharma and composed to teach statecraft to three dull princes in six months. It is the most widely translated secular work to come out of India: some two hundred versions in about sixty languages, and the ancestor of most European beast fable.
- Date
- -200–300
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
Every European version descends from one Pahlavi translation made for Khosrow I about 550 CE, which is itself lost. The Sanskrit original is also lost; what survives are recensions, including the Tantrākhyāyika of Kashmir and the Jain monk Pūrṇabhadra's of 1199, and the reconstruction of the earliest text is a scholarly problem rather than a settled one.
Dates from about 200 BCE to 300 CE are proposed and none is settled; Vishnu Sharma may be a frame-narrator rather than an author.
Connections (4)
- TransmissionCtesiphon
Khosrow I's physician Burzoe was sent to India, Persian tradition says, to find a herb of immortality, and came back instead with the Panchatantra, which he rendered into Middle Persian about 570. That version is lost, but Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic Kalila wa Dimna made from it survives and is the ancestor of the Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and European versions. A Sanskrit manual of statecraft for princes became the standard fable literature of three continents.
- TransmissionBaghdad
Ibn al-Muqaffa's Kalila wa Dimna, made at Baghdad in the eighth century from the lost Middle Persian version, became one of the founding works of Arabic prose and the route by which Indian fable reached Europe — through Hebrew and Latin to the Spanish and Italian collections and eventually to La Fontaine, who acknowledged an Indian source for several of his. The frame-story device itself, a tale containing tales, travels with it.
- TransmissionBurzōe
Burzoe was sent to India by Khosrow I specifically to get this book and translate it, and his Pahlavi version is the sole channel through which the Panchatantra left India westward. Both the Sanskrit original and the Pahlavi translation are lost, so the earliest recoverable form of the text is the Arabic made from the Pahlavi two centuries later. The whole European tradition rests on a double loss.
- AnalogueThe Jātakas
The Jatakas and the Panchatantra share stories, and both draw on a common stock of Indian animal fable older than either. The difference is what the frame is for: the Jataka frame makes each tale a previous life of the Buddha and a lesson in merit, and the Panchatantra frame makes it a lesson in how to survive a court. The same fox appears in both with opposite morals.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Panchatantra”. Franklin Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed (1924); Patrick Olivelle's translation (1997); Johannes Hertel's editions of the recensions.
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