Panchatantra

The Panchatantra, 'five books', is a collection of fables in Sanskrit that teach practical wisdom through stories about animals who talk and scheme. In its frame, a Brahmin named Vishnusharma teaches three dull princes the art of statecraft in six months by telling them tales. The five books deal with the loss of friends, the winning of friends, war and peace between crows and owls, the loss of gain, and rash action. Tales nest inside other tales, with verses inserted to sum up the lesson, and the characters include clever jackals, a lion king, monkeys, crows and a crocodile.¹⁴

The original Sanskrit text is lost, and scholars date its composition between about 200 BCE and 300 CE, with around 300 CE a common estimate; the author is traditional and uncertain. It belongs to the nitishastra tradition of political and practical advice and shares tales with the Jataka stories of the Buddhist tradition. Around 570 CE, the physician Burzoe translated it into Middle Persian for the Sasanian king Khosrow I, and about 750 the Persian writer Ibn al-Muqaffa made an Arabic version, Kalila wa Dimna, from which Syriac, Greek, Hebrew and Latin versions followed.¹²³

Through those translations the stories reached medieval Europe, where they influenced writers such as Boccaccio and La Fontaine, who named the Indian sage Pilpay as a source. The book is reported to exist in versions in more than 50 languages. In India the tales are still told to children, and the Panchatantra is among the most widely traveled works of world literature.¹³