Bhartrihari

The old Brahman’s generously presenting the king with the wonderful mango-fruit in our story, finds its parallel with a difference, in the Hindu romance entitled “Simhasana Dwatrinsatri,” or Thirty-two Tales of a throne, where a Brahman having received from the gods, as a reward for his devotional austerities, the fruit of immortality, joyfully proceeds home and shows it to his wife, who advises him to give it to the Raja Bhartrihari, as the wealth he should receive in return were preferable to an endless life of poverty.

When Raja Bhartrihari receives the fruit again he is astonished, and, on learning from the hætera from whom she had obtained it, he knew that his queen was unfaithful, and, abandoning his throne and kingdom, departs into the jungle, where he became an ascetic.

The God of Love," says the poet Bhartrihari, "sits fishing on the ocean of the world, and on the end of his hook he has hung a woman.

Indian wisdom is represented by passages from the great epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana; the Panchatantra and the Hitopadesa, two Sanskrit versions of the famous collection of apologues known in Europe as the Fables of Bidpaï, or Pilpay; the Dharma-sastra of Manu; Bhāravi, Māgha, Bhartrihari, and other Hindu poets.

Why did the Creator scatter his sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarely reciprocated, each lover pursuing so often another who flies him for a third, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, an imbroglio oddly enough found in a little poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the Hindoo Bhartrihari?