Pañchatantra

The Pañchatantra (“five books”) is an old collection of Conte S and Fable S in Sanskrit, probably oldest which reached us.

Compilation is allotted by it traditionally to a Brahmane named Vishnusharman, which would have produced it, with the Ve or the 6th century at the request of a Râja like a guide of government bound for the princes. Its organization in five books seems to rather indicate a choice conscious than a stacking of texts during time, contrary to the Jâtaka , collections of older and more Buddhist fables . All two comprise fables putting in scene animals at the anthropomorphic behavior. Sometimes one saw there the rehandling of a text of the Cachemire, now lost, the Tantrâkyayikâ , and which would date from the IVe or of the 5th century.

As of 570, the Pañchatantra knows a translation in pehlvî, a language Persan E, then in Arab under the name of Kalîla wa Dimna , in Greek at the 11th century, in Hebrew by Rabbi Joel with the XIIe, in Latin, between 1263 and 1278, by Jean de Capoue under the title of Directorium Humanae Vitae . Starting from this date, it is spread in everyone Western. A version Persian is translated into French by Gilbert Gaulmin under a pseudonym, into 1644, under the title the Book of the lights or the Control of the Kings, composed by wise Pilpay Indien, translated into French by David Sahid, of Ispahan, city capital of Persia . The Poussines Father makes of it also another translation in 1666 under the title Specimen sapientiae Indorum veterum ( Modèle of the wisdom of the former Indians ). He becomes finally one of the sources of the fables of Jean of the Fountain, which recognizes its debt in the foreword of its second collection of Fables : “It did not seem necessary to me to present my reasons here nor to mention the sources from which I traced my last topics. I will say, as in a dash of gratitude, that I owe the greatest part of it to the Wise Pilpaï Indian. ” Pilpay, Pilpai or Bidpai is generally the author to which one allots work in Europe, a deformation of the Vidyâpati Sanskrit, “Master of knowledge”. The tales are also spread in China and in the Southeast Asia on the roads of the Buddhist pilgrims. The Pañchatantra knew also several adaptations in India-even, like the very popular Hitopadesha and the Panchâkhyânoddhâra , written with the Goujerat by the monk jaina Meghavijaya towards 1660.

The work, as its name indicates it, is composed of five sets of themes parts gathering several texts:

Mitra Bhedha , “the Loss of the friends” (22 stories)
Mitra Laabha , “the Acquisition of the friends” (7 stories)
Suhrudbheda , “the War of the corbels and the owls”, in connection with the stratagems (17 tales)
Vigraha , “the Loss of the acquired goods” (12 stories)
Sandhi , “ill-considered Control” (15 stories)

The two jackals, Kalîla and Dimna (derivative of the Sanskrit Karataka and Damanaka ), hero of the first tale of the first book, are at the origin of the title of the arabo-Persan version, Kalîla wa Dimna . The first French translation is due to the abbot Dubois.

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