628 BLOOMFIELD— CHARACTER AND [April i8, 



story of Muladeva our hero thus transforms himself into a dwarf. 

 All sorts of devices for such transformations are familiar in Hindu 

 fiction; see especially Kathakoga, pp. 103, no, 114, 130, 135, 184; 

 Kathasaritsagara 37 and 74 (cf, Tawney, II, p. 632) ; Prabandha- 

 cintamani, p. 106; Meyer's Translation of Dagakumaracarita, p. 83. 



The dramatic, or almost tragic note in Muladeva's character is 

 his love for gambling. In the story digested above the boy, on arriv- 

 ing in UjjayinI, finds his father duly engaged in gambling in the 

 gambling-hall, just as the theft of the bedstead is a jibe on Mula- 

 deva's reputation as master-thief. In Samayamatrka 6.29 Mula- 

 deva is said to be skilled in the practices of the demon Kali, meaning 

 that he is a gambler. Devendra's story begins by telling that his 

 father drove him from home on account of this passion of his. In 

 the same story he, like Yudhisthira or Nala, loses his all by gambling ; 

 in consequence he is humiliated by a rival, and is driven from the 

 side of his beloved, the hetsera Devadatta.^^ 



It is a curious, yet rational trait of story tradition that an outside 

 atmosphere of complacency or benignity surrounds the scape-grace 

 shape of Muladeva. The story-tellers all like him. Don Giovanni 

 must go to perdition in the end, but, as long as he lives, he is too 

 entertaining to be read out of stage or drawing-room. It is true that 

 one solemn Jain text, the Jfiatadhyayana 19, cites him, or what 

 amounts to the same, his companion Kandarika, as a forbidding 

 example of sensuality.^* Yet there is no mistaking that he is beloved 

 of the romancer. And so it has come to pass that this dissolute 

 rogue and companion of the base, this " Schlaumeier and Erzspitz- 

 bube," as Jacobi once designated him, is done over into a real pious 

 hero by another Jain writer, Devendra, the author of the Vrtti to 

 the Uttaradhyayana. We are accustomed to an important difference 

 in the handling of fiction by Brahmanical texts on the one hand and 

 Buddhist and Jinist texts on the other. Brahmanical fiction is essen- 

 tially secular, tho it is employed sententiously to illustrate both the 



yogaghatika or yogangulika (both corrupt) ; in Samavidhana-Brahmana 3. 

 4. 3, golika. See above, and Jacobi, " Ausgewahlte Erzahlungen," p. 9, line 38; 

 10, line I ; 31, lines 29-33. 



-^ See below, p. 641. 



24 See Leumann, WZKM. vi. 43. 



