English
A passage for editorial review. A COLLECTION OF EASTERN STORIES AND LEGENDS FOR NARRATION OR LATER READING IN SCHOOLS SELECTED AND ADAPTED BY MARIE L. SHEDLOCK WITH A FOREWORD By Prof. T. W. RHYS DAVIDS AND A FRONTISPIECE By WOLFRAM ONSLOW FORD LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON AND CO. 1910 A 3Z-9 33 C3<\%z& s PREFACE In offering this volume to teachers, my chief aim is to provide material for narration which shall deal, not with things temporal but with the " Eternal Verities." These, if presented to our boys and girls in dramatic form, at the most impressionable period of their lives, will sink deeply into their minds. When presented in more direct JHfiicL didactic fashion, the same truths often fail- to- 'impress. These stories of the Buddha are not' for one age or one country, but for ail time'and for the world. I have suggested their meaning in the index to enable teachers to see the contents at a glance. I strongly urge that little or no explanation should be offered to the children vi PREFACE themselves. They will be sufficiently in- terested in the dramatic setting to absorb (unconsciously) the meaning of the story. The book is not intended primarily for children to read but for teachers to use in telling these tales, but when they have received the dramatic impression through the telling, they will have an added interest in reading the book for themselves. I have purposely avoided using illustrations to these stories. I want the children to make the mental picture suggested to them by the spoken word, and if they read the story after- wards, I do not wish to force them to abandon their own conception an5 adopt a general one, because this would mean . eliminating one of the most potent educational factors in the telling of the story. ••'•'- • I am greatly indebted to Professor Rhys Davids, not only because he has placed the material of his translation at my disposal, but because of his unfailing kindness and help in PREFACE vii directing the work. His preface will give value, from the scholarly point of view, to this collection : my own efforts have been limited to the selection of the most dramatic stories, and such as I know by experience will appeal to girls and boys. I most gratefully acknowledge my indebted- ness to the Cambridge Press, by whose courtesy and generosity I have been able to include eleven of the stories published in their volumes. I have kept to the direct translation in all cases where it was possible without breaking dramatic interest. But as my chief aim has been to present these stories in language effective for narrative purpose, I have some- times shortened them, most notably in Mr Rouse's beautiful translation of the King who sacrificed his eyes. For reading purpose the whole of his translation is of thrilling interest, but in the actual telling the details do not add to the dramatic strength. In the story of the Parrot, I have made viii PREFACE little or no change in Mr Rouse's translation, except that in the few verses which occur from time to time in the story I have given the gist of the verse in prose form instead of the verse itself. I have already told several of these stories, and have always found a warm response from children and adults. Marie L. Shedlock. FOREWORD I recollect riding late one night along the high-road from Galle to Colombo. The road skirts the shore. On the left hand the long breakers of the Indian Ocean broke in ripples on the rocks in the many little bays. On the right an endless vista of tall cocoanut palms waved their top-knots over a park-like expanse of grass, and the huts of the peasantry were visible here and there beneath the trees. In the distance a crowd had gathered on the sward, either seated on the grass or leaning against the palms. 1 turned aside — no road was wanted — to see what brought them there that moonlight night. The villagers had put an oval platform under the trees. On it were seated yellow- robed monks with palm-leaf books on their laps. One was standing and addressing the ix x FOREWORD folk, who were listening to Bana, that is " The Word " — discourses, dialogues, legends, or stories from the Pali Canon. The stories were the well-known Birth-stories, that is the ancient fables and fairy-tales common to the Aryan race which had been consecrated, as it were, by the hero in each, whether man or animal, being identified with the Buddha in a former birth. To these wonderful stories the simple peasantry, men, women and children, clad in their best and brightest, listen the livelong night with unaffected delight, chatting pleasantly now and again with their neighbours ; rising quietly and leaving for a time, and returning at their will, and indulging all the while in the mild narcotic of the betel-leaf, their stores of which afford a constant occasion for acts of polite good-fellowship. Neither preachers nor hearers may have that deep sense of evil in the world and in themselves, nor that high resolve to battle with and overcome it, which animated some of the first disciples. They all think they are earning " merit " by their easy FOREWORD xi service. But there is at least, at these full- moon festivals, a genuine feeling of human kindness, in harmony alike with the teachings of Gotama, and with the gentle beauty of those moonlit scenes.1 It is not only under the palm groves of the South that these stories are a perennial delight. Wherever Buddhism has gone they have gone with it. They are known and loved on the plains of Central Asia, in the valleys of Kashmir and Afghanistan, on the cold table-lands of Nepal, Tartary and Tibet, through the vast regions of India and China, in the islands of Japan and the Malay archi- pelago, and throughout the jungles of Siam and Ann am. And not only so. Soldiers of Alexander who had settled in the East, wandering merchants of many nations and climes, crusading knights and hermits who had mixed with Eastern folk, brought the stories from East to West. They were very popular in Europe in the Middle Ages ; and were used, 1 See Rhys Davids' Buddhism (S.P.C.K.), pp. 57, 58. Xll FOREWORD more especially by the clergy, as the subjects of numerous homilies, romances, anecdotes, poems and edifying plays and mysteries. The character of the hero of them in his last or former births appealed so strongly to the sympathies, and especially to the religious sympathies, of mediaeval Christians, that the Buddha (under another name) was included, and has ever since remained, in the list of canonised saints both in the Roman and Greek Churches y and a collection of these and similar stories — wrongly but very natur- ally—ascribed to a famous story-teller of the ancient Greeks, has become the common property, the household literature, of all the nations of Europe ; and, under the name of ^Esop's Fables, has handed down, as a first moral lesson - book for our children in the West, tales first invented to please and to instruct our far-off cousins in the distant East. So the story of the migration of the stories is the most marvellous story of them all.1 1 For the details of this story the introduction to my Buddhist Birth Stories may be consulted ; and for the history of the FOREWORD xin And, strange to say, in spite of the enormous outpouring of more modern tales, these old ones have not, even yet, lost their charm. I used to tell them by the hour together, to mixed audiences, and never found them fail. Out of the many hundred Birth- stories there are only a small proportion that are suitable for children. Miss Shedlock, so well known on both sides of the Atlantic for her skill and judgment in this regard, has selected those she deems most suitable ; and, so far as I can judge, has succeeded very admirably in adapting them for the use of children and of teachers alike. Much depends, no doubt, upon the telling. Could Miss Shedlock her- self be the teller, there would be little doubt of the success. But I know from my own experience that less able story-tellers have no cause at all to be discouraged. The reason is, indeed, not far to seek. The stories are not ordinary ones. It is not on sharpness of repartee, or on striking incidents, Jatakas in India the chapter on that suhject in my Buddhist India. xiv FOREWORD that their charm depends. These they have sometimes.