109
each of you separately such a long story: so hear it all of you now, and look at my knee." Then all the mendicants laughed till their sides ached, and said, " What a great fuss he has made about a very small matter !"
" You have heard of the foolish Buddhist monk, now hear of the foolish Țakka."
Story of the man who submitted to be burnt alive sooner than share his food with a guest.:— There lived somewhere a rich but foolish Țakka*[1] who was a miser. And he and his wife were always eating barley-meal without salt. And he never learned to know the taste of any other food. Once Providence instigated him to say to his wife, " I have conceived a desire for a milk- pudding: cook me one to-day." His wife said, " I will," and set about cooking the pudding, and the Țakka remained in doors concealed, taking to his bed, for fear some one should see him and drop in on him as a guest.
In the meanwhile a friend of his, a Țakka who was fond of mischief, came there, and asked his wife where her husband was. And she, without giving an answer, went in to her husband, and told him of the arrival of his friend. And he, lying on the bed, said to her; " Sit down here, and remain weeping and clinging to my feet, and say to my friend. My husband is dead.' †[2] When he is gone, we will eat this pudding happily together." When he gave her this order, she began to weep, and the friend came in, and said to her, " What is the matter?" She said to him " Look, my husband is dead." But he reflected, " I saw her a moment ago happy enough cooking a pudding. How comes it that her husband is now dead, though he has had no illness? The two things are incompatible. No doubt the two have invented this fiction because they saw I had come as a guest. So I will not go." Thereupon the mischievous fellow sat down, and began crying out, " Alas my friend ! Alas, my friend !" Then his relations, hearing the lamentation, came in and prepared to take that silly Țakka to the burning-place, for he still continued to counterfeit
- ↑ * The Petersburg lexicographers explain țakka as Geizhals, File; but say that the word țhaka in Marathi means a rogue, cheat. The word kadarya also means niggardly, miserly. General Cunningham (Ancient Geography of India, p. 152) says that the Țakkas were once the undisputed lords of the Panjáb, and still subsist as a numerous agricultural race in the lower hills between the Jhelum and the Rávi.
- ↑ † So in the Russian story of "The Miser," (Ralston's Russian Folk-tales, p. 47,) Marko the Rich says to his wife, in order to avoid the payment of a copeck; " Harkye wife ! I'll strip myself naked, and lie down under the holy pictures. Cover me up with a cloth, and sit down and cry, just as you would over a corpse. When the moujik comes for his money, tell him I died this morning." Ralston conjectures that the story came originally from the East.
