XII-XIII

12/08/17

Kalidasa:
Called the Shakespeare of India.
Abhijnana Shakuntala; this play is about the recognition of Shakuntala:
Dushyant is a king who once goes out hunting and he meets this maiden called Shakuntala, who is a forest
maiden, tribal.
He falls in love with her, tells her to come to his court, gives her a ring so he knows its her.
She loses the ring, so she is unable to go the court.
Most of the play is about her moping and weeping over how she has lost the ring and her love.
She weeps, her maids weep. (Dido’s songs after Aeneas tells he’s leaving)

Kalidasa has a poem on how a wife should say goodbye to her husband properly when he’s leaving the
house.
This was a problem earlier, because if the wife is like ‘don’t go, don’t leave me’, she’s too melodramatic,
the husband will be too nervous and won’t be able to concentrate on work. If she’s too careless in saying
goodbye, he’ll think that she doesn’t care about him at all. This was a big problem during Kalidasa’s time
because this could get a woman beaten up. It plays into the egos of everyone, not getting an appropriate
response.

Kalidasa was criticised for his work; people said he wrote stuff that was too melodramatic, masala film
type stuff.
He even wrote a rebuttal to his criticism, that’s how much criticism he got. In that he said ‘if someone
somewhere gets a meaning from my work, I’m happy, that’s the aim’

-Bhartrihari, another poet

-Baburnama
-Akbarnama

One of the most important concept of Indian literature was short stories; our biggest export: fables which
have travelled all over and become very popular.
-Panchatantra
-Jataka
-Kathasaritsagara (Ocean of Stories)
These are collections of folktales.
Half of Aesop's fables, 1001 nights are stolen from here. This seems to be the origin of the fable format.

Each of these collections has a different framework around it.

This is called a nested story: a story within a story within a story.
Panchatantra:
There’s a king who has young princes who are completely useless; they don’t want to learn how to run the
state properly. The King is worried that once he dies, what’ll happen. They’ll waste the entire kingdom.
He has to find a way to teach them the ways of the state.
He gets in touch with this guru called Vishnu Sharma who is tasked with teaching these princes on how to
be good kings; he does this by telling them stories.

It’s composed of five books.

It encompasses topics like when should a king make new friends, when is the time to drop friends, how to
employ deceit.
All the characters in the Panchatantra are animals

The Crows and the Owls:

There is a war going on between a tribe of crows and a tribe of owls.
They’re fighting over a tree, they both want to nest in the same tree, during the day the crows take over,
during the night the owls take over.
Eventually the owls come up with a strategy. The patriarch of the tribe says, ‘we need to end this war so
pluck all my feathers out and leave me at the base of the tree’
The crows then come and ask him why have your children abandoned you.
He says because I told them to surrender to the mighty crows, so they called me a traitor, did this to me
and threw me out, abandoned me.
Owl says, ‘take me in, I’ll be your strategist, I’ll help you beat the owls’
They take him in.
At night when the crows are asleep, he gets up and sets fire to the tree thus killing all the crows.
This story teaches about infiltrating the enemy, making strategy.
Complex things explained in simple terms.

The sparrow and the mouse:

A sparrow has a nest at the bottom of a tree.
She goes away for the winter and upon returning, finds that a mouse has taken over her nest.
They start bickering over it.
There’s a holy person sitting nearby who they decide to seek advice from, the holy person is a cat.
Cat, ‘no no my children, please don’t fight, come to me, I’ll solve your problem’
They’re so busy fighting that they don’t notice it’s a cat.
Once they get close enough, the cat eats them.
Moral: don’t fight this much amongst each other that you start trusting an enemy to resolve your disputes
for you.

There is this framework of Vishnu Sharma telling these kids stories and within these story, there are
numerous other stories.
The Panchatantra is basically political, aim is to teach political lessons.
Jataka
The aim of the Jataka tales is religious.
It is a Buddhist text and was very popular, it appealed to people a lot.
It was written in Pali, the common man’s language so it was easily accessible.
The morals in the Jataka are more religious. They’re about good behaviour in society.

There’s a story about the tortoise who talked too much.

His pond is drying up so he has to go to another one.
He tells his two stork friends to carry him there. ‘You hold a stick between your feet, I’ll hold onto it with
my mouth and then you guys can carry me there’
They say no no you talk too much.
Eventually they agree and make the journey.
Midway tortoise sees something down about which he makes a comment, leaves stick, falls and dies.
Very direct, simple story.
Moral: If you can’t say something good, don’t talk at all.

Question: Give two examples of stories from the Panchatantra and explain how they give a political
meaning.

There is no one authentic Panchatantra.

In the Jataka, the nesting framework has to do with the Bodhisattvas (someone who is on their way to
enlightenment or someone who has achieved enlightenment and has come to help others along the same
path)
Apparently Prince Siddhartha had to go through 52 reincarnations before he was born as Prince
Siddhartha.
The Jataka are 52 stories of his 52 different incarnations.

A story about humility:

There’s a few animals in the forest: monkey, rabbit (Bodhisattva), otter, jackal
They’re observing a holy festival.
They say ‘on this holy day we should fast, and collect all our food and give it any passerby who is
hungry’
As they’re doing this, the king of the gods turns up and asks for food.
Otter gets fish, monkey gets grapes, rabbit gets grass.
‘I can’t eat grass, what is this’
‘But I can’t offer anything else’
‘Then your sacrifice is useless’
Rabbit then says, ‘I will offer myself to eat’ and jumps into the fire.
At this moment the passerby takes his true form and saves the rabbit. Calls him wise.

Sky is falling story. Lion is the Bodhisattva here.

Kathasaritsagara:
While the previous are religious and political, the Kathasaritsagara is commercial.
It’s written at an age when commerce was very important. It is a collection of stories belonging to the
Vaishya class.
The moral of these stories is: how to make great amounts of money or how to not incur huge losses.

The format: hero presented with some sort of problem to solve or he’s foolish and causes a loss.

Daydreaming dairyman:
Man gets a lot of milk from his cow; vessel is kept; he sleeps and starts dreaming about the riches he will
reap from making ghee from the milk and selling it; after collecting money I’ll be able to buy a cow
which’ll give me more milk and more ghee, from this profit I’ll buy 100 cows and be the richest cow-herd
in the city, then I’ll sell ghee to the King who’ll give me lots of money, then I’ll be so rich that a beautiful
girl will want to marry me, he’ll have a kid with her who will be very naughty, ‘I’ll discipline the kid’ and
on saying this he kicks and breaks the matka of milk.
‘Don’t cry over spilled milk’
Moral: Don’t daydream, you’ll lose a lot of money.

The format of the Kathasaritsagara is the most interesting, complex out of all.
These are stories written by a troll in the forest.
Why is he writing these stories?
Because in his previous birth, he was one of Shiva’s ​ganas​, one of his guardsmen.
He was Shiva’s watchman, he’d keep watch outside Shiva’s bedroom.
One day, Parvati was sitting on Shiva’s lap and he was telling her stories.
The watchman has to deliver a message to Shiva, Nandi who is the watchman tells him to not disturb
them, but he is adamant.
He turns invisible and goes into Shiva’s chambers.
He hears Shiva tell all these stories to Parvati, he thinks they’re so wonderful that upon going home, he
goes and tells his wife these stories, and his wife tells another person, and then the stories spread all over
town. Parvati gets to know and she’s curious as to how everyone knows these stories. She eventually
traces it back to the watchman, she curses him: ‘Since you saw it fit to tell other people my stories, tell
everybody​ my stories; you will be reborn as a troll and won’t be able to return to Kailash until everyone in
the world has heard these stories’
So he is reborn as a troll.
He writes down all these stories in 7 great books; since he’s a troll he cannot write them in Sanskrit, he
writes them in Troll's Tongue, which was the common man’s language (could be Pali)
He goes to the King to show him this, but King refuses to read this ‘lowly language’, I’m a high born king
and I will only read Sanskrit.
The troll is thrown out and is very sad.
‘Now I’ll never get to go back to Kailash’
In the forest, he starts reading these stories out loud to nobody in particular.
As he’s reading each page, he burns it.
All the birds and animals gather to hear his stories; that’s how they will spread all over the world.
He burns 6 of the 7 books.
By this time the King repents and calls him back.
There’s only one book remaining now; this is the Kathasaritsagara.

(Shiva Telling Parvati)

(​ Troll writing it down)
(several stories; one of these is Vikram and Vetal)
Stories go on folding inward.

Vikram and Vetal.

There is a king called Vikramaditya, who is very rich, very prosperous.
Everyday a Brahmin comes to him and gives him a fruit; and the king just tosses it in his warehouse.
The Brahmin keeps this practice up for a number of years; one day Vikram drops it and turns out there is
a gem inside the fruit. He goes to his warehouse, and finds that there are gems in each fruit.
Next time, he confronts the Brahmin and asks him why he does this.
‘Because you are the greatest king in the whole world, and I have a way for you to become even greater
and even richer’
‘How do I do that?’
‘You have to make a sacrifice to Kali; you have to sacrifice a corpse: Vetal that lives in a graveyard’

Vikram goes to the graveyard where Vetal is hanging upside down by a tree; gets him down and starts
bringing him back.
This is where the stories within the stories start.
Vetal says ‘it’s a long walk, so I’m going to tell you stories and at the end of every story, I’ll ask you a
question If you don’t know the answer to the question, you’re safe. If you know the answer, you have to
give me the answer or your head will explode if you know the answer and not tell me. But if you talk, I’ll
go back to the tree and we’ll start all over’
Vikram is the problem solver and he’s super intelligent; so Vetal has made his own intelligence the
obstacle.
Vikram’s problem now is that he knows the answer to every question.
So Vetal goes back to the tree every single time.
Princess and the pea origin story here.
He’s constantly given puzzles and he always has a clever answer.
In the end, Vetal asks him a question to which there can be no answer:
There’s a king and a queen who are separated. There’s king, queen, prince, princess.
Through a twist of circumstances what happens is the king ends up marrying his own daughter, queen
marries her own son. They each have children and Vetal asks him what is the relation between both of
them.
This is how Vetal is finally brought to the Puja place.
Vetal tells Vikram that, ‘the Pujari who actually told you to do this is a conman, he doesn't want to
sacrifice me, he wants to sacrifice you, so when you bow in front of Kali’s statue, he will cut your head
off, and he will get all the power and wealth for himself. That’s why he wants to sacrifice me but he also
wants to kill you’
Vikram initially doesn’t believe him. Then he does.
He asks Vetal how to get out of this.
‘Ask him to show you what the proper way to bow in front of Kali is, he will be happy that you asked for
his knowledge thereby flattering his intellect, so he will demonstrate and then you cut his head off’
That’s what they do.
Then Indra comes down and gives Vikramaditya even more money.

People have evolved morally. Now they don’t need the farce of a cosmic battle to settle a property
dispute, they’ll just be very honest about it.
The reward for anything in the Kathasaritsagara is a ton of money.
Chinese Literature

Confucius:
A renowned Chinese scholar.
He’s responsible for collecting the five great classics of Chinese literature.
His PoV about mythology is this ‘the gods are too big to even bother with us, so I’m not going to talk
about them very much, there’s no point in communicating with these beings even if they exist, they aren’t
relevant to your everyday life’
Confucius was more obsessed with how one should behave in their everyday life.
He creates a code of conduct in Chinese society which was very highly looked upon. Not supposed to be
violated.
The five great classics were ancient classics that were just collected by Confucius.
We don’t even know if he was one man.

One of the best known classics is called the I Ching.

The I Ching was a tool that the ancient Chinese used for divination, to tell the future.
This has all their elements of philosophy, it has all the iconography, trigrams.
Confucius’ main work was anecdotes in which he gave advice on how to live a good political life, how a
good citizen should live, a code of conduct for good people (similar to concept of Xenia; do unto others as
they do unto you)
How should a good king be?
A good king should be the most moral, best behaved person in the kingdom because a good king is the
north star for everyone.
In Confucius’ world, the King is the least free citizen in the whole kingdom. (he’s like Aeneas, just doing
his duty)

One of his stories talks about how he’s going to go live amongst the tribes in the west of China. People
regard the people there as wild people.
‘How will you go and survive amidst those uncultured people,’ his disciples ask him.
‘Don’t worry, the presence of one virtuous, superior man will purify their entire area and teach them
manners. I will lead by example, I will bring culture to that place.’ // completely opposite to modern
standards: one rotten apple spoils every other apple //
It’s a very collectivist philosophy, sacrificing for the greater good, like the Romans.
Very idealistic society.

Chuang Tzu
Lao Tzu’s most prominent student was a guy called Chuang Tzu/Cho.
Lao Tzu was a hermit living out in the wild, Chuang Cho also followed his example.
Chuang Cho was so uninterested in societal matters, that one day when he was fishing, someone came to
him and offered him position of a governor as he was very wise and the earlier governor had died.
He didn’t even bother looking up, that’s how disinterested he was.

He tells the story of this one guy who is hunting a bird in a state garden.
He’s hunting a magpie and the magpie isn’t aware that it is being hunted, because it is very focused on
eating an insect; that insect isn’t aware that the magpie is hunting it because it’s focussed on eating
another insect.
The guy who’s hunting the magpie isn’t aware of one fact: the watchman of the garden is after him to
kick him out because hunting isn’t allowed.
Moral: It tells us about how we’re blind to other things when we’re just focussed on one thing. We miss
the rest of the picture because we’re focussed on only one part of it.

Chuang Cho refuses to name anything. Super abstract.

‘There’s no point in giving things names. The name is only a signifier, it’s not a thing in itself. If I define
what something is, I’m also defining what it isn’t.’
There’s a chair in the desert and no one is sitting on it; is it still a chair?
When we make these assumptions, when we put things in boxes, categorizing them, we limit their use and
we forget our original logic, making us illogical, irrational.
His writing is very advanced for his time.

He tells this story about one surgeon who is asked why are your skills so good.
The surgeon in turn tells a story about a masterchef called Tan whose knife is so sharp it’s never had to be
sharpened, the edge has never dulled.
People ask him why this is; Tan says ‘an amateur cook hacks at things, he cuts wherever he needs to,
through the bone, through the muscle, an expert cook slices judiciously, he knows what he’s doing. I am
such a great chef, my expertise is such is that I only cut through joints in the bones, I cut only tendons, my
knife never touches the bone hence never loses its edge’
This is Chuang Chou's rudimentary way of explaining how if you look at a problem as a whole, you can
solve it really quickly, identifying weak points and tackling them.

There’s a story about an albatross that’s so huge, it flies very high above the clouds; never sees land,
doesn’t know land exists. All it knows are the clouds.
Moral: when you move around in your field, you will only see things in your field, you won’t see things
below your level. This is why intellectuals were disconnected from normal life.

Chuang Chou's work has a lot of individualism in it. ‘Trust your own eyes, not someone elses’
The Journey to the West
Hiuen Tsang was a monk who came to India from China, studied at Nalanda university at Orissa.
He stayed there for 12 years studying and then travelled back to China.
He came during Chandragupta’s reign.
He came to India because he was a Buddhist scholar and India is the birthplace of Buddhism so he wanted
to get something from the source back to China.
This whole journey took him 20 years.
He walked from Eastern China to India which took him 4 years; stayed for 12 years studying, went back:
4 more years.
He documented his journey in his diary, a record of his travels. A very practical, simple record.

He was so popular that this account has become fictionalised over the ages into a novel called The
Journey to the West. The best example of how a real story can turn into a myth over centuries because of
people just working on it, writing fan fiction.
Hiuen Tsang's name is completely changed by the time this book is written; it is Tripitaka.
The Journey to the West is a mythological, fanciful tale full of creatures from Chinese mythology.

Tripitaka is a very pious and dedicated monk, very celibate (name comes from Triptych)
He gets a mythical origin story too.
His father was a great expert in Chinese culture i.e. Confucius, the five great classics; he has given the
civil service examination and passed, very wise, is appointed to an important government position.
He’s given the post of a governor of a prefecture (zilla type)
He’s going to occupy his new post; before he goes, he finds a young beautiful wife.
On the way to the prefecture: the boatman gets very jealous of him, kills him, throws him overboard,
threatens wife.
Boatman steals his personality, becomes the new Governor.
The wife is already pregnant, she gives birth to the child.
Boatman doesn’t want child growing up and wanting revenge; so he puts him in a basket, sets him off on
a river.
This baby, Tripitaka, reaches a monastery downstream where he is raised by Buddhist monks as a very
pious monk; he grows up to be super pious.

He’s so pious that, along the journey that he will take, any demon or monster (male) that eats him will
attain immortality. Any female monster who seduces him will attain immortality.
So on his journey, male monsters are always going to try to eat him and female monsters will always try
to seduce him, take his celibacy away. The story has already become super fictionalized.

Tripitaka has companions with him who are all magical creatures; he is the only human being on the
journey.
The main character of the journey is called Sun Wukong who is the Monkey King.
The Monkey King is a very popular character in Chinese mythology.
He’s more or less like Hanuman.
Why will Sun Wukong who is the Monkey King go with Tripitaka on this journey?
Sun Wukong was born by the action of the Sun and the Moon on a rock; he hatched out of that rock.
He’s not a normal monkey, he’s already supernatural.
While growing up he studied the philosophy of Lao Tzu. ‘Anything can be anything’; very abstract
philosophy. After studying Lao Tzu, he attains supernatural powers; he can fly, change his shape.
One comedic aspect to this: whichever animal he changes to, he will retain the tail of the monkey. That
monkey aspect will always remain.

As he gains more and more power by studying Lao Tzu, he climbs up to heaven and wreaks havoc there.
Jumping from house to house, hitting things with a stick; Gods come and he beats them up too with his
stick. This goes on until one of the generals of heaven decides to intervene; they fight for several days.
Eventually the Buddha himself puts an end to this fight. He captures Sun Wukong and imprisons him
under a mountain: the mountain of four seasons.
‘If you sit here for a long time, maybe I’ll give you a chance to return to heaven; you have to do some
penance for 400 years then I’ll give you a chance’
What is the chance?
He has to accompany Tripitaka and bring the scrolls back to China safely.
He’s been assigned as Tripitaka’s bodyguard/ servant. (like Hanuman in Ramayana)

They have many adventures along the way.

There are other characters: Pigsy, very piglike, all he wants to do is eat,sleep, chill; Sandy, a sand monster
and a white horse. These are shapeshifters, Yakshas who have taken these shapes.

Tripitaka’s a pious monk who just wants to get on with his mission, but he’s weak, lacks courage.
Pigsy was a general in heaven and was kicked out for raping the daughter of the moon god.
The first thing he did after landing on earth was: kill a farmer and rape his wife. He lives here doing
nothing but making merry. He’s told the same thing as Sun Wukong: if you do penance you’ll have a
chance to go to heaven. He’s not bothered at all by this chance.
Tripitaka has to drag him along, almost against his will.

Over the years a lot of legends were folded into this story.
A lot of stories from the Odyssey are also folded into this.
The Monkey King is almost like Odysseus.
He will have to overcome obstacles like Tripitaka’s mortality and his cowardice; he’ll have to overcome
Pigsy’s indulgence. The biggest problem that he’ll have to overcome is his own monkeyness. He
constantly has an urge to disrupt things just to disrupt them; he has an innate desire to mess things up.
This is going to be a problem because he is on a pious mission for the gods and you can’t fuck up and do
things like these.
So, every time he misbehaves Tripitaka will have to control him; how?
There’s a female Bodhisattva in this story who is guiding them along the way
She gives Tripitaka a cap to put on Sun Wukong’s head; so every time he recites a particular Buddhist
sutra (called the diamond sutra), the cap gets tighter and causes Sun Wukong great pain; he has to fight
his own nature.
Sun Wukong also recites the diamond sutra at times to remind Tripitaka of how important their mission
is.
All of them have certain virtues and flaws; they balance each other out.
Tripitaka’s virtue and purity will help keep Sun Wukong’s monkeyness under control; while Sun
Wukong’s supernatural powers will help overcome Tripitaka’s mortality.
They will both drag Pigsy along against his will; Pigsy just stops when he sees food.

They collect the scrolls from India and come back to China.
Tripitaka comes home to the monastery and eventually he is told that he was found floating on the river.
He goes and traces his mother; mother tells him of his father's murder and the boatman.
They go under the water and they see that father is still alive; he’s being cared by a Yaksha, a water spirit.
The father is brought back up and boatman is punished.
Tripitaka and family live happily ever after.

Possible question: How people turn a real story into myths; (Journey to the West)