No. 28. — 1884.] first fifty jatakas. 



103 



his hold of the stick by which they were carrying him ; this 

 also a widely-known fable. Neither of these, it will be seen 

 at once, has in itself any connection with Buddhism, but is 

 only connected with it by the pretence that the Buddha had 

 professed to have witnessed the event in one of his own 

 previous lives. And so, Mr. Davids goes on to give us " The 

 Jackal and Crow," two mutual flatterers ; " TheWise Judge," 

 ( as Mr. Davids names an extract from the Ummaga Jataka), 

 in which he who was afterwards to be the Buddha decided 

 a question by a method very like the judgment of Solomon ; 

 and then a curious story of a magical hatchet, drum, and 

 bowl. These five tales are all, so far as any moral or 

 doctrine goes, vUv npos ^dvoaou, quite irrelevant to Bud- 

 dhism ; and the sixth, called " A Lesson for Kings," is the 

 only one of those selected as specimens, which we could by 

 any means suppose to have been invented by Gotama. 



In regard, however, to those specimens which Mr. Davids 

 has given of fables or tales known to the Western world, 

 he has shown reason to think in some instances that the 

 Jataka form of the story is the older. Thus, in the Jataka 

 story of the " Lion's Skin" there is no impossible or super- 

 natural element ; a natural explanation is given of the ass 

 having got into the skin ; namely, that its owner, a pedlar, 

 put the lion's skin upon it in order that the villagers, as 

 he travelled about, might be afraid to approach it, and so 

 it might feed cheaply on their standing corn. Hence this 

 form of the story is held to be more primitive. And so on. 

 But in the case of what he calls " The Wise Judge," Mr. Davids' 

 critical faculty has deserted him. He rambles about the 

 possibilities of intercourse with Jews, and whether Solo- 

 mon's ships carried the fame of his judgment to Ophir ; but 

 he has failed to observe that the Jataka tale is beyond all 

 question not an original, if only for these two reasons, — 

 that it occurs in a long list of methods for detecting 

 tricks, as evident a collection of existing stories as could 

 be ; and, secondly, that the judge is not said to have him- 

 self discovered the false mother by this method, but only 

 to have thereby exposed to bystanders what he had already 

 perceived by other meaus, having known at the first 

 glance, by her red eyes and other symptoms, that she was 

 not a woman but a demon. 



