The Pañcatantra

The Pañcatantra (“Five Treatises” or “Five Strategies”) is an ancient Indian collection of animal fables in Sanskrit prose and verse, composed probably between the second century BCE and the third century CE and attributed to a sage named Viṣṇuśarman. Its frame story explains its purpose: King Amaraśakti of Mahilāropya has three sons who are dunces; despairing of teaching them, he entrusts them to the old Brahmin Viṣṇuśarman, who promises to make them wise in the art of nīti — practical wisdom, statecraft, the conduct of affairs — in six months. He does so by telling them stories, in which animals act out the dilemmas of politics and life.

Each of the five books has a frame story into which many other stories are nested, often three or four deep, the characters telling each other tales to make their points. Book 1, The Loss of Friends, tells how two jackals, Karaṭaka and Damanaka, ministers of a lion king, destroy the friendship between the lion and a bull through slander; it contains the story of the clever hare who leads a tyrannical lion to a well, where the lion, seeing his reflection and thinking it a rival, leaps in and drowns. Book 2 tells how a crow, a mouse, a tortoise and a deer become friends and save each other. Book 3, Crows and Owls, is about war and diplomacy. Book 4 tells of the monkey and the crocodile: the crocodile’s wife wants to eat the monkey’s heart, and the monkey, carried out to sea, escapes by claiming he left his heart in the tree. Book 5 tells of the Brahmin who rashly kills the faithful mongoose that has saved his baby from a snake.

The Pañcatantra is perhaps the most widely travelled book of the ancient world: through its Persian translation (6th century) and its Arabic version, Kalīla wa-Dimna (8th century), it passed into Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German and English, and influenced the fables of La Fontaine, the Arabian Nights and countless folk tales. In India it remains the first book of stories for children.