Notes on the story of Kīrtisenā

Note: this text is extracted from Book VI, chapter 29:

The feeding of Rākṣasas:

“She was terrified, thinking to herself: ‘Lo! I shall be devoured by this Rākṣasī after escaping all my other misfortunes’. And in the meanwhile the Rākṣasī ascended that tree. And her sons ascended after her, and immediately said to that Rākṣasī: ‘Mother, give us something to eat’. Then the Rākṣasī said to her children: ‘To-day, my children, I went to a great cemetery, but I did not obtain any food’”

Cf. Thorpe’s Yule-tide Stories, p. 341, cited before in Vol. I, p. 48n², also Sagas from the Far East, p. 162. The Mongolian version supplies the connecting link between India and Europe. In the Sagas from the Far East the Rākṣasas are replaced by crows. Cf also the way in which the gardener in “Das Rosmarinsträuchlein” (Kaden, Unter den Olivenbäumen, p. 12) acquires some useful information. The story of Kīrtisenā from this point to the cure of the king closely resembles the latter half of “Die Zauberkugeln” in the same collection. See also Waldau’s Böhmische Märchen, p. 272; Gaal, Märchen der Magyaren, p. 178; Coelho, Contos Populares Portuguezes, p. 47. In Waldau’s story there is a strange similarity in the behaviour of the king, on first seeing the young physician, to that of Vasudatta.

—A striking parallel appears in the Pentamerone, second diversion of the second day (Burton, vol. i, p. 152), where Nella, hidden in a tree, overhears the ghul being persuaded by the ghula to tell her how the wounded prince can be healed. “Now you must know,” said the ghul,

“that there is nought upon the face of the earth nor in the heavens that can save the prince from death, but by anointing the wounds with our own fat: that would detain the soul and hinder it from taking flight, and prevent it from forsaking its home, the body.”

By a clever trick Nella succeeds in making the necessary ointment. For a few specimens of the “overhearing” motif in Indian folk-tales see Note 2 at the end of this chapter.—n.m.p.

The curing of the King’s disease:

“... In that city there lives a great king named Vasudatta addicted to virtue; he defends this whole forest, dwelling on its border, and himself takes duties and chastises robbers. Now one day, while the king was sleeping in the forest, fatigued with hunting, a centipede quickly entered his ear unobserved. And in course of time it gave birth to many others inside his head. That produced an illness which now dries up all his sinews. And the physicians do not know what is the cause of his disease, but if someone does not find out he will die in a few days. When he is dead, eat his flesh; for by eating it you will, thanks to your magic power, remain satiated for six months...”

“... And hear how his great disease may be taken away. First his head must be anointed by rubbing warm butter on it, and then it must be placed for a long time in the heat of the sun intensified by noonday. And a hollow cane tube must be inserted into the aperture of his ear, which must communicate with a hole in a plate, and this plate must be placed above a pitcher of cool water. Accordingly the centipedes will be annoyed by heat and perspiration, and will come out of his head, and will enter that cane tube from the aperture of the ear, and desiring coolness will fall into the pitcher. In this way the king may be freed from that great disease...”.

The extraordinary cure mentioned above is the outcome of ancient Indian medical beliefs which still exist to-day amongst certain castes. The earliest views on medicine are found in th e Atharva-Veda, where most diseases are attributed to the influence of demons, but a large number are ascribed to the presence of worms (practically a form of demon) located in various parts of the body. They are most fantastically described (see, for instance, Atharva-Veda, ii, 31 and 32; v, 23). Headache and ear and eye diseases, as well as intestinal illnesses, were attributed to worms. The belief received impetus by the teachings of the great Buddhist physician Jīvaka Komārabhacca, a contemporary of the Buddha himself, whose cures included opening the skull and removing from the brain headache-producing centipedes. His treatises were translated into Tibetan, and stories of his cures appear in the Kah-Gyur. Thus in Schiefner and Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, p. 103, we read:

“At Vaiśālī there lived a man into whose ear a centipede had crept, and had therein given birth to seven hundred young ones. Toynented by his pains in the ear, this man went to Jīvaka and entreated him to cure him. Jīvaka said to himself, ‘Hitherto I have acted in accordance with my teacher’s instructions, but now I will act according to my own intelligence.’ He said to the man, ‘Go and make a hut out of foliage, carpet it with blue stuff, place a drum underneath, and make the ground warm.’ The man provided everything as he was told. Then Jīvaka made the man lie down, sprinkled the ground with water, and beat the drum. Thereupon the centipede, thinking that the summer was come, crept out. Then Jīvaka placed a piece of meat on the ear. The reptile turned back, but presently came out again with its young ones, and they all laid hold of the piece of meat. Whereupon Jīvaka flung it into the flesh-pot, and the man recovered his health.”

In the great medical work of Suśruta, produced about the commencement of the Christian era, we find remedies which

“should be particularly employed in destroying the different classes of vermin which infest the regions of the head, heart, mouth and the nostrils. The liquid expressed out of horse-dung should be dried and then successively soaked several times in the decoction of Vidanga. The preparation should be blown into the nostrils.”

Similar treatment, we are told, should be used in cases of Dantāda worms—i.e. vermin that have taken lodgment in the teeth (see Suśruta Saṃhitā, Bhiṣagratna’s trans., Calcutta, vol. iii, 191 6, pp. 342, 343).

In modern India practically the same cure for carious teeth as that described in our text is still employed by the Beḍiyā, Beṛyā (Beria or Bedia) caste. In an article on “The Gypsies of Bengal” (Memoirs read before the Anth. Soc. Ldn., vol. iii, 1870, p. 127) Bābu Rājendralāla Mitra describes the different tricks employed by the Beḍiyānī:

“Palmistry is her special vocation; and cupping with bufFalo-horns, and administering moxas and drugs for spleen and rheumatism, take a great portion of her time. She has a peculiar charm for extracting maggots from the root of carious teeth. When a boy, the writer of this note was subject to irritation and swelling of the gums from carious teeth, and for it the affection of a fond mother, and the general ignorance of the healing art at that time, suggested no better remedy than the mantra of the village Beḍiyānī. On three different occasions we had to submit to her, and thrice she charmed out small communities of little maggots by dint of repeating a variety of most indecent verses. She used to apply a tube of straw to the root of the carious tooth, and every now and then bring out a maggot in its barrel. Once spun cotton was used instead of straw, but with no diminution of success. The operation was, no doubt, a deception, but the relief felt was unmistakable and permanent.”

For further details about this caste see Russell’s Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, vol. ii, p. 220 et seq. I can find no exact analogues to the above in European folk-lore. Schiefner and Ralston (op. cit., p. li) mention a modern Greek story in which a girl is relieved from the presence of a number of snakes which had taken up their abode within her, by being suspended from a branch of a tree above a cauldron of boiling milk, the vapour arising from which induced the reptiles to come forth. A cobra story, similar to that in our text, appears in Frere’s Old Deccan Days (see p. 62).

For details and further references on Indian medicine see J. Jolly, “Disease and Medicine (Hindu),” Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Eth., vol. iv, pp. 753-755; and G. M. Bolling, “Disease and Medicine (Vedic),” idem, pp. 762-772.