# The Katha Sarit Sagara/Chapter 82

​ his wishes gratified. And Śattvaśila ruled as king over the cities of the Daitya Princess.
" Now tell me: which of those two shewed most courage in plunging into the water?" When the Vetála put this question to the king, the latter, fearing to be cursed, thus answered him; " I consider Sattvaśila the braver man of the two, for he plunged into the sea without knowing the real state of the case, and without any hope, but the king knew what the circumstances were when he plunged in, and had something to look forward to, and he did not fall in love with the Asura princess, because he thought no longing would win her." When the Vetála received this answer from the king, who thereby broke silence, he left his shoulder, as before, and fled to his place on the aśoka-tree. And the king, as before, followed him quickly to bring him back again; for the wise never flag in an enterprise which they have begun, until it is finished.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
(Vetála 8.)
Then king Trivikramasena returned to the asoka-tiee, and again caught the Vetála, and put him on his shoulder, and set out with him. And as he was going along, the Vetála again said to him from his shoulder, " King, in order that you may forget your toil, listen to this question of mine."
Story of the three fastidious men.:— There is a great tract of land assigned to Bráhmans in the country of Anga, called Vrikshaghata. In it there lived a rich sacrificing Bráhman named Vishnusvámin, And he had a wife equal to himself in birth. And by her he had three sons born to him, who were distinguished for preternatural acuteness. In course of time they grew up to be young men. One day, when he had begun a sacrifice, he sent those three brothers to the sea to fetch a turtle. So off they went, and when they had found a turtle, the eldest said to his two brothers, " Let one of you take the turtle for our father's sacrifice, I cannot take it, as it is all slippery with slime." When the eldest brother said this, the two younger ones answered him, " If you hesitate about taking it, why should not we?" When the eldest heard that, he said, " You two must take the turtle; if you do not, you will have obstructed our father's sacrifice; and then you and he will certainly sink down to hell." When he told the younger brothers this, they laughed, and ​ said to him, " If you see our duty so clearly, why do you not see that your own is the same?" Then the eldest said, " What, do you not know how fastidious I am? I am very fastidious about eating, and I cannot be expected to touch what is repulsive." The middle brother, when he heard this speech of his, said to his brother,— " Then I am a more fastidious person than you, for I am a most fastidious connoisseur of the fair sex." When the middle one said this, the eldest went on to say, "Then let the younger of you two take the turtle !" Then the youngest brother frowned, and in his turn said to the two elder, " You fools, I am very fastidious about beds, so I am the most fastidious of the lot."
So the three brothers fell to quarrelling with one another, and being completely under the dominion of conceit, they left that turtle and went off immediately to the court of the king of that country, whose name was Prasenajit, and who lived in a city named Vitankapura, in order to have the dispute decided. There they had themselves announced by the warder, and went in, and gave the king a circumstantial account of their case. The king said, " Wait here, and I will put you all in turn to the proof:" so they agreed and remained there. And at the time that the king took his meal, he had them conducted to a seat of honour, and given delicious food fit for a king, possessing all the six flavours. And while all were feasting around him, the Bráhman, who was fastidious about eating, alone of all the company did not eat, but sat there with his face puckered up with disgust. The king himself asked the Bráhman why he did not eat his food, though it was sweet and fragrant, and he slowly answered him, " I perceive in this cooked rice an evil smell of the reek from corpses, so I cannot bring myself to eat it, however delicious it may be." When he said this before the assembled multitude, they all smelled it by the king's orders, and said, "This food is prepared from white rice and is good and fragrant." But the Bráhman, who was so fastidious about eating, would not touch it, but stopped his nose. Then the king reflected, and proceeded to enquire into the matter, and found out from his officers*, that the food had been made from rice which had been grown in a field near the burning-ghát of a certain village. Then the king was much astonished, and being pleased, he said to him, " In truth you are very particular as to what you eat; so eat of some other dish."
And after they had finished their dinner, the king dismissed the Bráhmans to their apartments, and sent for the loveliest lady of his court. And in the evening he sent that fair one, all whose limbs were of faultless ​ beauty, splendidly adorned, to the second Bráhman, who was so squeamish about the fair sex. And that matchless kindler of Cupid's flame, with a face like the full moon of midnight, went, escorted by the king's servants, to the chamber of the Bráhman. But when she entered, lighting up tho chamber with her brightness, that gentleman, who was so fastidious about the fair sex, felt quite faint, and stopping his nose with his left hand, said to the king's servants, " Take her away; if you do not, I am a dead man, a smell comes from her like that of a goat." When the king's servants heard this, they took the bewildered fair one to their sovereign, and told him what had taken place. And the king immediately had the squeamish gentleman sent for, and said to him, " How can this lovely woman, who has perfumed herself with sandal-wood, camphor, black aloes, and other splendid scents, so that she diffuses exquisite fragrance through the whole world, smell like a goat?" But though the king used this argument with the squeamish gentleman, he stuck to his point; and then the king began to have his doubts on the subject, and at lust by artfully framed questions he elicited from the lady herself, that, having been separated in her childhood from her mother and nurse, she had been brought up on goat's milk.
Then the king was much astonished, and praised highly the discernment of the man who was fastidious about the fair sex, and immediately had given to the third Bráhman who was fastidious about beds, in accordance with his taste, a bed composed of seven mattresses placed upon a bedstead. White smooth sheets and coverlets were laid upon the bed, and the fastidious man slept on it in a splendid room. But, before half a watch of the night had passed, he rose up from that bed, with his hand pressed to his side, screaming in an agony of pain. And the king's officers, who were there, saw a red crooked mark on his side, as if a hair had been pressed deep into it. And they went and told the king, and the king said to them, " Look and see if there is not something under the mattresses." So they went and examined the bottom of the mattresses one by one, and they found a hair in the middle of the bedstead underneath them all. And they took it and shewed it to the king, and they also brought the man who was fastidious about beds, and when the king saw the state of his body, he was astonished. And he spent the whole night in wondering how a hair could have made so deep an impression on his skin through seven mattresses.
And the next morning the king gave three hundred thousand gold pieces to those three fastidious men, because they were persons of wonderful discernment and refinement. And they remained in great comfort in the king's court, forgetting all about tho turtle, and little did they reck of the fact that they had incurred sin by obstructing their father's sacrifice. ​ When the Vetála, seated on the shoulder of the king, had told him this wonderful tale, h again asked him a question in the following words, " King, remember the curse I previously denounced, and tell me which was the most fastidious of these three, who were respectively fastidious about eating, the fair sex, and beds ?" When the wise king heard this, he gave the Vetála the following answer, " I consider the man who was fastidious about beds, in whose case imposition was out of the question, the most fastidious of the three, for the mark produced by the hair was seen conspicuously manifest on his body, whereas the other two may have previously acquired their information from some one else" When the king said this, the Vetála left his shoulder, as before, and the king again went in quest of him, as before, without being at all depressed.
Note.
The above story resembles No. 2, in the Cento Novelle Antiche, and one in the Addition to the Arabian tales published by Mr. Scott. (Dunlop's History of Fiction, Vol. I, p. 415; Liebrecht's translation, p. 212 and note 282.) See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 203. In the Cento Novelle Antiche a prisoner informs the king of Greece, that a horse has been suckled by a she-ass, that a jewel contains a Worm, and that the king himself is the son of a baker.
The incident of the mattress reminds one of the test applied by the queen to her son's wife in " The Palace that stood on Golden Pillars," (Thorpe's Yuletide Stories, p. 64). In order to find out whether her daughter-in-law is of high birth, she puts first a bean, then peas, under her pillow. The prince's wife, who is really the daughter of a peasant, is apprised of the stratagem by her cat, which resembles Whittington's. Rohde in his Griechische Novellistik, p. 62, compares a story told by Aelian about the Sybarite Smindyrides, who slept on a bed of rose-leaves and got up in the morning covered with blisters. He also quotes from the Chronicle of Tabari a story of a princess who was made to bleed by a rose-leaf lying in her bed. Oosterley refers us to Babington's Vetála Cadai, p. 33, and the Chevalier de Mailly's version of the three Princes of Serendip. The three are sitting at table, and eating a leg of lamb, sent with some splendid wine from the table of the Emperor Behram. The eldest maintains that the wine was made of grapes that grew in a cemetery, the second that the lamb was brought up on dog's milk, the third says that the emperor had put to death the vazir's son, and the latter was bent on vengeance. All three statements turn out to be well-grounded. There are parallel stories in the 1001 Nights (Breslau). In Night 458 it is similarly conjectured that the bread was baked by a sick woman, that the kid was suckled by a bitch, and that the Sultan is illegitimate. In Night 459 a gem-cutter guesses that a jewel has an internal flaw, a man skilled in the pedigrees of horses divines that a horse is the offspring of a female buffalo, and a man skilled in human pedigrees that the mother of the favourite queen was a rope-dancer. Cp. also the decisions of Hamlet in saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in Simrock's Quellen des Shakespeare, 1, 81—85; 5,170; he lays down that some bread tastes of blood, (the corn was grown on a battle-field), that some liquor tastes of iron, (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well, in which some rusty swords had lain,) that some bacon tastes of corpses, (the pig had eaten a corpse), lastly that the king is a servant ​ and his wife a serving-maid. Oesterley refers also to the beginning of Donatus' life of Virgil, and to Heraclius Von Otte, also to the parallels quoted above from Liebrecht. The brother, who was so fastidious about beds, may be compared with a princess in Andersen's Tale of "The Princess on a pea," Gesammelte Märchen, Part III, 8, 62, (Leipzig, 1847). This is identical with a tale found in Cavallius' Schwedische Volkssagen und Märchen, German version, Vienna, 1848, p. 222, which resembles No. 182 in the older editions of Grimm's Kindermärchen. (Andersen's story is clearly the same as Thorpe's referred to above. ) Nearly akin is Diocletian's test in the Seven Wise Masters. His masters put an ash-leaf under the bed; and he remarks, " Either the floor has risen, or thereof sunk." (Oesterley, p. 215.) In the version in Simrock's Deutsche Volks-bücher, Vol. XII, p. 122, it is an ivy-leaf. See also Ellia's Metrical Romances, p. 412.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
(Vetála 9.)
So king Trivikramasena again went to the aśoka-tree, and taking the Vetála down from it, placed him on his shoulder, and set out. Then the Vetála said to him; " King, this wandering about in a cemetery at night is inconsistent with your kingly rank. Do you not see that this place of the dead* is full of ghosts, and terrible at night, and full of darkness as of the smoke of funeral pyres. Alas ! what tenacity you display in this undertaking you have engaged in, to please that mendicant ! So listen to this question from me which will render your journey more agreeable."
Story of Anangarati and her four suitors.:— There is in Avanti a city built by gods at the beginning of the world, which is limitless as the body of Śiva, and renowned for enjoyment and prosperity, even as his body is adorned with the snake's hood and ashes. † It was called Padmávatí in the Krita Yuga, Bhogavatí in the Tretá Yuga, Hiranyavatí in the Dvápara Yuga, and Ujjayiní in the Kali Yuga. And in it there lived an excellent king, named Víradeva, and he had a queen named Padmarati. The king went with her to the bank of the Mandákiní, and propitiated Śiva with austerities, in order to obtain a son. And after he had remained a long time engaged in austerities, he performed the ceremonies of bathing and praying, and then he heard this voice from heaven, uttered by Śiva, who was pleased with him, " King, there shall be born to thee a brave son to be the head of thy family, and a daughter, who with her matchless beauty shall put to shame the nymphs
* ↑ * Niyogajanitas is a misprint forniyogijanatas, as is evident from the Sanskrit College MS.
* ↑ * Literally " grove of ancestors," i. e., cemetery.
* ↑ † Here we have one of the puns in which our author delights.