The Rāmāyana as Animal Epos
The Indian people are human, and cruelty occurs amongst them occasionally. The fact that it is comparatively rare is proved by the familiarity and fearlessness of all the smaller birds and beasts. But in this unconscious attitude of the Indian imagination, in its mimicry and quick perception of the half fun, half pathos of the dumb creation, we have an actual inheritance from the childhood of the world, from that early playtime of man in which the four-footed things were his brethren and companions.
This whimsical spirit, this merry sense of kindred, speaks to us throughout the Buddhist Birth-Stories (Fātakas), as a similar feeling does in Æsop's Fables or in the tales of Uncle Remus. The Fātakas, it is true, deal with animal life as the vehicle of a high philosophy and a noble romance, instead of merely making it illustrate shrewd proverbs or point homely wit. The love of Buddha and Yashodarā formed the poetic legend of its age, and there was nothing incongruous to the mind of the period in making birds and beasts frequent actors in its drama. Swans are the preachers of gospels in the courts of kings. The herds of deer, like men, have amongst them chiefs and aristocrats, who will lay down their lives for those that follow them. Yet already, even here, we see the clear Aryan mind at work, reducing to order and distinctness the tangled threads of a far older body of thought. Out of that older substance are born the tendencies that will again and again come to the surface in the great theological systems of later times. Of it were shaped the heroes, such as Hanuman and Garuda, who step down into the more modern arena at every new formulation of the Hindu idea, like figures already familiar, to join in its action.
