The Sharing of Narrative Materials in the Middle Ages

Focus on Pancatantra

“From the earliest times India has been a vast storehouse of tales, many of which have traveled all over the world. Among the most widely known works in the narrative genre, known as katha or akhyayika (“story”), is the Pancantantra, a Gupta-period collection of animal fables. The most popular of the later kavya tale collections, however, is the Kashmirian poet Somadeva’s eleventh-century Kathasaritsagara (Ocean to the Rivers of Story), a compendium in narrative verse of picaresque tales, tales of the marvelous, and romances” (p. 1252).

“The history of The Thousand and One Nights is vague, and its shape is as hard to pin down as a cloud’s. The starting point of the work in Arabic was probably a collection of tales in Middle Persian called the “thousand stories,” which had been translated or adapted from Sanskrit in the time of the Sassanids (226-652), the last pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty. During the ninth and tenth centuries, a great deal of Persian literature, both popular and courtly, was translated into Arabic. . . .” (p. 1566).

“ . . . most significant literary works incorporated elements and values drawn from different and often conflicting traditions. . . . beginning in the twelfth century, Muslim centers of learning in Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy made it possible for European scholars to regain access to . . . Greek originals and to study their Muslim commentators” (pp. 1621-22).

Bust of Alexander the Great.
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Overview: A Storied Life

In his short life, Alexander of Macedonia did as much as any single individual ever has to bridge the gap between west and east—and he did it largely in the spirit of individualism, eager to assert his extraordinary abilities. He conquered Persia, founded a city in Egypt, and, in 326 B.C., seemed poised to achieve dominance in India. He won a great battle at the river Hydaspes, but the ferocity of the encounter led his army to mutiny. When his troops refused to push on eastward, Alexander gradually withdrew his forces. Three years later, Alexander was dead. In his wake, Greek culture changed and expanded its influence, becoming Hellenistic (like Greek) rather than Hellenic (Greek); this was achieved not so much by military conquest, but by the settlement of significant numbers of Greek soldiers and traders in India. Since trade routes enable ideas as well as merchandise to move from one spot to another, an opening was created for the transfer of intellectual property from east to west. The vehicle for this transfer was language: Alexander’s campaigns brought Greek to the East and paved the way for the later importation of Latin with the ascent of Roman power.

Alexander builds a wall between Gog und Magog in a Persian miniature owned by the Chester Beatty Library (Ms. 395.1).
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Although India resisted Alexander’s military assaults, he left an indelible mark on Asian cultures and became himself a subject for art and literature. Fantastic narratives about his exploits appeared in a multitude of languages; Persian and Arabic literature and art, for example, record the legendary exploits of Iskander or Sikander, the names by which he is referred to in Eastern texts, and in many traditions he was exalted to godhead. The military leader who personified the West thus became a subject of the narrative art that has flourished so remarkably in the East. Such stories flowed from one cultural center to the next. By the Middle Ages, primarily due to the spread of Islam, the traffic reached a high point. Western European languages flourished and idiosyncratic literary traditions developed. Yet beneath the individual voices and attitudes that emerged, a shared narrative content can be traced. Several of the texts in the Norton Anthology allow us to map the route from the Sanskrit beast fable to the Persian storybook to the Arabic Thousand and One Nights. The process of transformation and appropriation provides evidence of humanistic globalization centuries before that term was used to characterize a technologically linked world economy.

Asian Originals: Teaching About the Good Life

A diagram showing the complicated transmission of the Pancatantra, prepared by Nafisa Abd El-Sadek, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh.
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The Transformations of the Pancatantra

The dizzying travels of the stories in the Pancatantra exemplify the circuitous routes taken by narrative materials in the Middle Ages. According to J.A.B. van Buitenen, “Two hundred different versions are known in some sixty-odd languages” (The Literatures of India: AnIntroduction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974], p. 200.) Probably composed without their frame story centuries before they were compiled, these popular beast fables persist in a myriad of versions. Short narratives about talking animals emanate from rural cultures; as the cultures that produce them become more sophisticated, they repackage these simple tales to serve more complex social situations. Aesop, a slave in pre-democratic fifth-century Greece, is said by Herodotus to have told animal fables for satirical purposes; such fables were adapted in the Jataka to teach Buddhist ideals; and in the Pancatantra they were used to promote “the wise conduct of life,” as the translator Arthur W. Ryder renders the term niti. Of the distillation of the moral content of the Pancatantra in elegant epigrams, Ryder remarks, “It is as if the animals in some English beast-fable were to justify their actions by quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible” (Translator’s introduction, The Panchatantra [Chicago: University of Chicago, 1925], p. 12).

Left: Thief discovered in a bedchamber. Right: The perils of life.
Kalila wa Dimna.
Herat, 1430.
Hazine 362, folio 24a , 27b
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The original Sanskrit Pancatantra was lost. Because the tales had been translated into Middle Persian and Syriac in the sixth century, and then reconstituted as Kalila wa Dimna in an Arabic version based on the Persian by Abdallah Ibn al-Muqaffa in the eighth century, these stories, also known as The Fables of Bidpai (the name springs from the Sanskrit term for a court scholar, which was the role filled by Visnusarman, the presumed author of Pancatantra), survived. Kalila wa Dimna was translated into Greek and from the Greek into Slavic languages; and a Hebrew version dating from about 1250 was translated into Latin by a converted Jew known as John of Capua. From the Latin came Italian, German, and English translations. In every culture, the well-characterized animals—jackals (the Sanskrit Karataka and Damanaka becoming the Arabic Kalila and Dimna), lions, monkeys, mice, and more—stand in for human beings trying to live together. In contrast to the great religious and spiritual themes that ancient Indian epics engage, the short stories address secular concerns like friendship and how to act when friendship fails.

This image, based on an ancient fresco in the Ajanta caves in Western India, shows a successful sea voyage from Indian ports like Tamralipti to South Asian destinations.
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Oceans and Stories

Another lost Sanskrit original, The Great Romance (Brhatkatha) lies behind Somadeva’s Ocean to theRivers of Story or Kathasaritsagara. The watery motif, which extends to the term used for the sections of the book (taranga or waves), suggests both the copiousness of story, a bottomless, life-giving resource, and the milieu of so many of these tales of merchants and seafarers. The Red Lotus of Chastity, the selection in the Anthology, is set in and around the thriving seaport of Tamralipti, which in the time of the Gupta dynasty (335-470) was India’s gateway to the east. Note that Guhasena’s business takes him to Cathay; as the editor points out, this refers not to “China but an island in Southeast Asia or Indonesia” (fn. 5, p. 1346). Devasmita, the story’s heroine, is a native of “the Archipelago” (p. 1345) who elopes with Guhasena by sailing away from home at night, and then follows him to Cathay disguised as a merchant who must, of course, travel by sea. In the thoroughly material world of The Red Lotus ofChastity, bourgeois protagonists find wealth and personal fulfillment in the maritime equivalent of the Silk Road. Even the symbolic red lotus, with its spiritual aura, draws sustenance from the oozy mud.

This image of an unveiled Mongol princess observing the world from the window of her carriage captures the spirit of the keen-eyed Shahrazad, who boldly relates her stories. This fourteenth-century Persian miniature may be found on a Web site created by high school students in the San Francisco United School District: these pages offer commentaries and images documenting styles in Islamic clothing.
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The Thousand and One Nights

Probably the most famous source of narrative materials traveling from east to west, The Thousand and One Nights has an even more complicated and ultimately mysterious history than the Pancatantra or the Kathasaristsagara. The Anthology headnote summarizes what we know, emphasizing the evidence of a South Asian narrative core, since so many of the stories in the Middle Persian story collection known as the “thousand stories” were probably translated from the Sanskrit not too long after the Pancatantra was compiled and The Great Romance was composed. In other words, in the middle centuries of the first millennium, a time of vigorous trade, sophisticated court life, and remarkable intellectual activity in Persia and the Indian subcontinent, storytelling that captured that vigor, sophistication, and wit flourished and gave the world the stuff on which its authors were to draw for another millennium at least.

A set of Russian dolls, in which the larger contains a smaller version of itself, almost ad infinitum, in much the same way that boxed stories proliferate nuggets of unfolding narrative.
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NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

The characters and plots of these various story compilations have been enormously influential. There can be very few persons who have not heard tales about talking animals, wily merchants, and resourceful females, most of which ultimately derive from South Asia. Even more powerful, however, have been their narrative techniques, which suggest that no story exists in a vacuum. The Pancantantra, the Kathasaristsagara, and TheThousand and One Nights all have frame tales that establish the reason for collecting a group of stories; and they also include embedded tales, separate stories within the larger stories, as well as groups of boxed tales, in which one of these embedded stories generates another. The implication is that without stories we cannot make sense of what happens to us: stories propagate stories; one tale may not only call forth a new one but also prompt the recollection of an earlier event. In TheThousand andOne Nights, two bedroom activities mesh. What saves Shahrazad’s life? The three sons she produces in the aptly numbered nights of generation, or the stories? In some deep way, they both embody survival.

Embedded Tales

A nineteenth-century French depiction of Brahmins, representing the color white, from an exhibit on precious jewels mounted by the American Museum of Natural History.
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The Red Lotus of Chastity contains four embedded stories that could be dispensed with if the only concern of the story were to reunite the two lovers. The main story begins by establishing the milieu in which its events take place: “In this world is a famous port, Tamralipti, and there lived a rich merchant whose name was Dhanadatta” (p. 1345). Next, we learn that he has no sons, which leads him to assemble “many brahmins” and ask for their help in getting one. The brahmins will assist Dhanadatta, but for a price. Rather than move directly to the commercial transaction, however, they tell the first embedded story about a sonless king who went to great lengths to engender boys. The priests perhaps are hinting that if a king could sacrifice a single son to propagate more, Dhanadatta can easily afford “a stipend for their sacerdotal services.” He pays it and Guhasena is born.

A sad-looking dog, from a Web site maintained for dog breeders.
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The second embedded story, describing the savage thievery of Siddhikari (“She Who Can Accomplish What One Desires”), also casts an ostensibly religious figure in a dubious light. The wandering Buddhist nun Yogakarandika tells a fairly extended tale that acts as an advertisement for her services to the four brothers who want to seduce Devasmita while Guhasena trades in Cathay. Once employed to help the merchant’s sons, to distract Devasmita’s barking dog, the nun feeds it a sneezing powder. The poor animal’s distress provides the cue for the third embedded story, in which the nun assures Devasmita that in another life, she and the dog “were the wives of a Brahmin” (p. 1348). This reminds us of the “deep metaphysical implications,” to quote the headnote (p. 1344), of stories in a culture that believes in karma. Of course, this nun’s tale has a dubious moral, to recommend adultery—“Our highest duty, you know, is to yield to the demands of sense and element” (p. 1348). The shrewd Devasmita sees through Yogakarandika’s fiction, which reminds us that a story’s success requires the cooperation of its audience. The final embedded story is told by Devasmita to her mother-in-law, as prelude to her sailing in male disguise to Cathay to save her husband from the vengeance that the humiliated merchants’ sons may decide to wreak on him. Here again, the nested story (of the faithful Saktimati, who saves her straying husband’s reputation by bribing a temple priest to let her change places with the woman with whom he has been trapped inside the sanctum) assumes the corruptibility of those in holy orders.

Weights that South Asian merchants used to guarantee the value of their transactions.
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In the main narrative, once she reaches Cathay, Devasmita triumphs by bringing the hidden out into the open; instead of buying the cooperation of those who should be safeguarding virtue, she wins ransom money from the members of the merchants’ guild who redeem their four branded colleagues. The story concludes with Guhasena and Devasmita, considerably enriched, back in the trading center of Tamralipti, never to be separated again. Devasmita has reversed the pattern of each of the embedded stories. Instead of relying on the suspect claims of characters with some religious affiliation, Devasmita takes matters into her own hands and completes the satisfying formal strategy of The Red Lotus of Chastity by beating her adversaries at their own game. For the device of the sneezing dog, she substitutes the dog’s-paw branding iron; to greet each of the merchant’s sons disguised as the nun’s pupil, Devasmita sends a maid in her own guise. Thus the clever heroine asserts the strengths of a good woman and punishes her antagonists as if they were animals rather than human beings. Her four male adversaries are stripped of their clothes and marked with the dog’s paw brand; Yogakarandika and Siddhikari have their noses and ears cut off.

From a Paint Shop Pro Users group site maintained by Juan Perez, who offers tutorials in manipulating graphic imagery on the Web. Why do we frame pictures?
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Frame Tales

The frame tale of The Thousand and One Nights allows another good woman, Shahrazad, to triumph by exposing herself to risk. Shahrazad’s emotional and imaginative resources enable her to save not only herself but to restore health and dignity to her husband and his entire realm. The Thousand and One Nights contains hundreds of embedded tales, which would include the tales the Vizier tells his daughter in order to persuade her not to marry Sharayar, and boxed tales, such as those in The Story of theMerchant and the Demon, but the frame story itself, at least in the versions of the Nights that have survived, never comes to a full resolution. The conclusion of Husain Hadaway’s Thousand and One Nights contains a Translator’s Postscript: “tradition has it that in the course of time Shahrazad bore Sharayah three children and that, having learned to trust and love her, he spared her life and kept her as his queen” (The Arabian Nights, New York, 1990, p. 428). In other words, in the authoritative fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi, the frame story is not resumed. This open-endedness, which contrasts with the puzzle-like intricacy typical of sets of boxed Indian tales, seems to be a characteristically Arabic form, comparable to the additive style of mosque architecture; see Katharine Slater Gittes, “The CanterburyTales and the Arabic Frame Tradition,” PMLA 98 (March 1983): 237-51.

The courtyard of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, from a Web site maintained by The Fletcher School of Tufts University: note the proliferation of arches and the absence of a central focal organizing point.
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EUROPEAN APPROPRIATIONS

The complexity and inventiveness of Asian stories are in themselves reason enough to explain their remarkable endurance. But the Christian West found another justification for perpetuating them by transforming the originals for religious and didactic purposes often quite alien to their native cultural roots.

“Scholars Debating”: from an illustrated German manuscript of Barlaam und Josaphat dating from 1469, owned by the Getty Museum.
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Greek Translation as a Bridge from East to West

One of the most famous examples of this strange metamorphosis is Barlaam and Josaphat, a reshaping of the Buddha legend traditionally attributed to St. John of Damascus (ca. A.D. 676-749), a Christian who lived in Muslim Syria. Scholars now believe that the work was actually written in the eleventh century. In any event, in Barlaam and Josaphat, the Buddha story has undergone significant change. The Indian Prince Josaphat, modeled on Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, perplexes his royal father, who not only has tried to protect him from the harsh realities of human existence, as does Siddartha’s parent, but explicitly wishes to keep him from converting to Christianity. Josaphat’s encounters with suffering, like Siddartha’s, deeply impress him; the Christian hermit Barlaam, distantly modeled on the ascetic in the Buddhist story, guides him in his search for a better life, and after withstanding temptations, Josaphat embraces Christianity. His name derives from the Middle Persian form of the Pali Bodhisatta: Budasaf. The spirit of the original, however, has been undermined. The heart of the Buddhist story is the young prince’s active pondering of the nature of existence, which leads him to formulate a new spiritual system; in the Christian retelling, greater emphasis falls on Josaphat’s passive reception of the grace of God. And, as G. MacQueen has argued, in Barlaam and Josaphat, the mild king of the Buddha story turns into an aggressive figure. This shift perhaps reflects the historical period in which the Christianized work was translated into Greek: “a time of intense religious violence, warfare and persecution” (“Changing Master Narratives in Midstream: Barlaam and Josaphat and the Growth of Religious Intolerance in the Buddha Legend’s Westward Journey,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 5 [1998], 166).

Grammatica, a personification of grammar, one of the seven arts and sciences in the medieval curriculum of Western Europe, from a twelfth-century manuscript; this image appears on an online course site developed at the University of Oklahoma.
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Latin Translations as a Bridge from East to West

A cultural gulf opens up between Buddhist and Christian attitudes in a serious work like Barlaam and Josaphat. Less violence is done to the animals fables of the Pancatantra or the secular tales of the Kathasaristsagara, but the moral tags assigned to such narrative materials become much more pious in their adaptation for Christian readers. We see this tendency in two Latin compilations of translated stories from the East. The Scholar’s Guide of Petrus Alfonsi (b. 1062), “the first link in a Western chain that leads to Chaucer’s narrative art” (Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in MedievalEngland, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977, p. 96), was the work of a converted Jew (like John of Capua, who translated a Hebrew version of Kalilawa Dimna into Latin, and thus made it available to Western European readers). Moshe Sephardi, born in a Spanish town under Islamic control, became Petrus Alfonsi when the town was taken by the Christians. His knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic gave him access to Oriental tales, among them the story of the weeping dog that is associated with the wicked Buddhist nun in The Red Lotusof Chastity. Another version of this story also appears in the Gesta Romanorum, a second Latin anthology of fables that swept across Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, recycling material from Barlaam and Josaphat, The Scholar’sGuide, and other sources. In the Gesta’s version of the story, the wife who is a counterpart of Devasmita allows a visit from the youth promoted by the old woman, only to be surprised by her soldier husband, who “put the whole party to a shameful death.” Following each such tale, the Gesta Romanorum offers an “application” that makes the story usable by the preacher who has with it a ready-made moral. Here is the application for Tale XXVIII, “Of the execrable devices of old women:”

My beloved, the soldier is Christ; the wife is the soul, to which God gave free will. It is invited to the feast of carnal pleasures, where a youth, that is, the vanity of the world becomes enamoured of it. The old woman is the devil; the dog the hope of a long life, and the presumptuous belief of God’s clemency, which leads us to deceive and soothe the soul. But Christ will come during the night, and condemn the sinner to death.

Trans. Charles Swan (London: George Routledge, 1924), p. 129

Lady with a Parrot, after an original nineteenth-century painting by Mieris.
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OVERVIEW: ASIAN STORIES INTHE MEDIEVAL WEST

The preachers who found inspiration for their sermons in collections like The Scholar’s Guide and the Gesta Romanorum form another link in the chain that spans the more than one thousand years in which narrative materials circulated across the Eurasian land mass. Writers like Boccaccio and Chaucer may have heard these stories as children sitting in church or later on in conversation with travelers; perhaps they read them as they actively sought material for their professional use. Whatever the means of transmission and whatever the scope, from the briefest allusions to wholesale appropriations to the very idea of the frame narrative, borrowings from the East permeate their work: for example, when the Wife of Bath recommends to her three old husbands the ruse by which a “prudent wife . . . should swear the parrot’s mad” (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, ll. 236-37), she assumes that they know The Tale of the Husband and the Parrot that we recognize from TheThousand and One Nights (p. 1599). When the gamblers in The Pardoner’s Tale challenge the old man who longs to die, his reference to India may be a shadow of his origins in Asian stories. Most notably in the tales of the Wife and the Pardoner, which tell us so much about their deepest longings, the European writers, heirs to the individualism of figures like Alexander, linked the frame not only to a situation (telling tales to edify princes or amuse queens or preserve lives), but also to the content of the individual tales. Close study of the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales reveals a new kind of psychological penetration, in which the tale leads us into a deeper understanding of the teller. As a desire for self-aggrandizement fueled Alexander’s ambition in the ancient world, in medieval (and modern) Europe, a need for self-revelation increasingly fueled narrative.