Note on the story of the Monkey and the Porpoise

Note: this text is extracted from Book X, chapter 63.

“There lived in a forest of uḍumbaras, on the shore of the sea, a king of monkeys, named Valīmukha, who had strayed from his troop. While he was eating an uḍumbara fruit, it fell from his hand, and was devoured by a porpoise that lived in the water of the sea”

This is the beginning of the fourth book of the Pañcatantra. Benfey does not seem to have been aware that it was to be found in Somadeva’s work. It is also found, with the substitution of a boar for the porpoise, in the Sindibād-Nāmah, and thence found its way into the Seven Wise Masters and other European collections. (Benfey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 420 et seq.) See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, pp. 122, 123. For the version of the Seven Wise Masters see Simrock’s Die Deutschen Volksbücher, vol. xii, p. 139. It also occurs in the Mahāvastu Avadāna, p. 138 of the Buddhist Literature of Nepal, by Dr Rājendralāla Mitra, Rai Bahādūr. The wife of the kumbhīla in the Vānarinda Jātaka (57 in Fausböll’s edition) has a longing for a monkey’s heart. The original is, no doubt, the Sumsumāra Jātaka in Fausböll, vol. ii, p. 158. See also Mélusine, col. 179, where the story is quoted from Thorburn’s Bannū or Our Afghan Frontier.

——Cf. Hertel, op. cit., pt. i, p. 139, pt. ii, p. 140 et seq. I have already (Vol. I, pp. 224, 225) given a short précis of the Suṃsumāra Jātaka, when dealing with the Dohada motif, and notes on the “External Soul” motif (Vol. I, 38 n, 129-132).

With regard to the story itself I quite agree with Clouston (Book of Sindibād, p. 212) that there is little if any resemblance between the story in our text and versions in Sindibād, Libro de los Engaños, Syntipas, etc. In fact, the only points of resemblance at all appear to be in the introduction of a monkey and a tree of figs. Curiously enough, a much nearer variant is found in a Swahili collection. Here a monkey is in the habit of feeding a shark with fruit from a tree. One day the shark invited him to come to his home in the sea. Off they set, but on the way the shark said: “Our sultan is ill, and nothing can cure him but a monkey’s heart.” “But don't you know,” replied the monkey, “that we always leave our hearts in trees, and go about with our bodies only?” and so made good his escape. (See G. Ferrand, Contes Populaires Malagaches, Paris, 1893, p. 77; and E. Steere, Swahili Tales, 1870, p. 1.)

There is also a Japanese story in which the monkey’s liver is required for the Queen of the Sea. After he has been conducted to her palace beneath the waves, he is told this by the jelly-fish, and at once says that he always keeps his liver at home. “It is raining; my liver will decay, and I shall die”; so saying, he starts off, as he says, to fetch it, taking good care, however, not to return. (See Bastian, Die Vælker des Oestlichen Asiens, iv, p. 340; and W. E. Griffis, Japanese Fairy World, p. 144.) Both the above parallels are taken from J. A. Macculloch, Childhood of Fiction, pp. 131, 132.

Dr Gaster refers me to his Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sagen- und Märchen - kunde, Bucharest, 1883, pp. 53-57, where he deals with the subject in question. It is to be reprinted in his forthcoming Studies and Texts. See the analogues given by K. Campbell, Seven Sages of Rome, p. lxxxiii.—n.m.p.