Date of Panchatantra

The Panchatantra is India's great contribution to the world's heritage of beast-fables. Hertel thinks that it dates back to the second century B.C. In any case it must be much older than the sixth century A.D. When it was first translated into a foreign language-Pahlavi or Middle Persian, the work is among the world classics, which have scored the highest number of translations. Hertel was recorded over two hundred different versions in over fifty languages. Its influence has been worldwide and we can hear its distant echo even in La Fontaine's charming fables written as late as the seventeenth century." The various important recensions of the Pancatantra have been classified into four groups, which represent diversity of tradition but all of which emanate from the lost original. The first is the lost Pahlavi version. From this, old Syriac and Arabic versions were derived; and it was though this source that the Pancatantra, in a somewhat modified form, was introduced into the fable literature of Europe. The second is a lost North-western recension, from which the text was incorporated into the two North-western (Kasmirian) Sanskrit versions of Gunadhya's Brhatkatha, made respectively by 7. Krishna Chaitanya, A New History of Sanskrit Literature Delhi, 1977, p. 361.

22 Ksemendra and Somadeva (11 th century A.D.). The third is the common lost source of the Kasmirian version, entitled Tantrakhyayika, and of the two Jaina versions, namely, the simplicior Text, well known from Buhler and Kielhorn's not very critical edition, and the much amplified Ornatior Text, called Pancakhyana, of Purnabhadra (1199 A.D.). The fourth is similarly the common lost source of the Sourthern Pancatantra, the Nepalese version.