The Ocean of the Rivers of Story (Volume 1)

Clay Sanskrit Library

by Somadeva, James Mallinson (Translator)

Soma-deva composed his "Ocean of the Rivers of Story" in Kashmir in the eleventh century CE. It is a vast collection of tales based on "The Long Story," a now lost (and perhaps legendary) repository of Indian fables, in which prince Nara-vahana-datta wins twenty-six wives and becomes the emperor of the sorcerers. There are tales within tales within tales. By turns funny, exciting, or didactic, they illustrate points within the narrative or are told simply to provide entertainment for the protagonists. Its twenty thousand plus verses are written in simple but elegant Sanskrit and it has long been used as an introductory text for students of the language.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

Genres: Literature

556 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Somadeva Bhatta

11th century Kashmiri writer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somadeva

Reviews

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful myths and folklores written by the brahmin societies. Only in one story was the kingdom of Magadha mentioned. The three worlds includes the gods, the asuras and humans. Noteworthy that in the stories only 3 castes according to Brahmin ideals are included, the brahmins, the warriors and the merchants. The gods are anthropomorphic, capable of all human emotions and participate in sexual activities as well. If you could believe the author, the world is full of handsome kings and brahmins and ravishing princesses cursing and being cursed by each others.

[mwr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes as delightful as Burton's musings on the Arabian Nights.

Oh Rats! I'm actually reading a different edition. This review refers to vol. 1 of "the ocean of story, being C.H. Tawney's translation of Somadeva's Katha sarit sagara."

[Mark Beeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and translated flow of stories. Relax and enjoy. I loved it.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Párvati, the wife of the god Shiva, asks him to tell her a completely new story, he tells her the story of the Emperor of the Sorcerers. However, a certain gana (a kind of spirit) named Push-pa-danta overhears them, and tells the story to his wife, who tells it to someone else, and eventually Párvati hears it and accuses Shiva of telling her an old story. Shiva investigates and finds out the truth, and confronts Push-pa-danta. His friend, another gana named Mályavan, defends him, and both are cursed to be reborn as humans. Meanwhile, a yaksha (another sort of spirit) named Supratíka has been cursed by the god Kubéra to become a piśaka or ghoul. [I don’t have the font to render all the diacritics properly.] The conditions of the curse are that Push-pa-danta (reborn as Vara-ruchi) must find Supratíka (now known as Kana-bhuti) and tell him the story, when his curse will end, and then Kana-bhuti must find Mályavan (reborn as Gunádhya) and tell it to him, when his own curse will end. Gunádhya must then make the story known, and his curse will end. Gunádhya composes the story as a long poem of seven hundred thousand verses, which is appropriately called the “Long Story”. The “Long Story” of Gunádhya, if it is not simply a fiction, no longer exists, but we have five abridged versions, one in Tamil, one in Old Jain Maharáshtri, and three in Sanskrit; only two of the Sanskrit versions abridge the entire story, one of which is Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara, translated here as (The Ocean of the Rivers of Story).

The Clay Sanskrit Library was a series of bilingual Sanskrit/English books modeled on the Loeb Classical Library for Greek and Latin texts. The Ocean of the Rivers of Story was projected to be published in nine volumes, but alas! we live in a capitalist society. The foundation which was publishing the CSLran out of money and the library had to be discontinued, leaving several multi-volume works incomplete, including the two great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and The Ocean of the Rivers of Story. Only the first two volumes of this story collection were completed and published, and that is what I am reading.

The incompleteness is not as much of a disadvantage as it would be if the book were a single story, but it is actually structured like the Thousand and One Nights with a frame story that contains other stories which contain other stories; in fact, it is probably the model for the later Arabic work, at least indirectly through a lost Persian collection. Some of the stories were familiar to me from their analogues in the 1001 Nights. Where the later book is divided into “nights”, this is divided into Attainments, which are subdivided into “Waves”. The first Attainment contains the stories of Vara-ruchi and Gunádaya, and how they came to meet up with Kana-bhuti; the second and third Attainments deal with the parents of the Emperor of the Sorcerers. This first volume ends in the middle of the third Attainment.

There are six pages of notes, more than half of which were noting emendations in the Sanskrit text; I could have used a lot more since I am not familiar with much of the mythology that is taken for granted in the book.

The date of the work is not certain, but it was probably around the middle of the eleventh century.