[312] So at p. 121 of the Mahāvaŋsa the king sends Mahinda to find out why the state elephant refused his food. Mahinda finds the motive to be that the elephant wants a _Dāgaba_ to be built; and the king, “who always gratified the desires of his subjects,” had the temple built at once! The author of the Mahāvaŋsa must often have heard the Jātaka stories told, and this among the number. [313] _Note by the Commentator._ “This so-called enforcing (or illustrating) the story by a discourse on the Four Truths is to be understood at the end of every Jātaka; but we only mention it when it appears that it was blessed (to the conversion of some character in the Introductory Story).” [314] These “Six” are noted characters in Buddhist legend. They are six bad monks, whose evil deeds and words are said to have given occasion to many a “bye-law,” if one may so say, enacted in the Vinaya Pitaka for the guidance of the members of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants. [315] This was a December festival, held to celebrate the close of the season of WAS, the four (or, according to some authorities, three) months of rainy weather, during which the members of the Order had to stay in one place. The Buddha had spent WAS among the angels--not, of course, that he cared to go to heaven for his own sake, but to give the ignorantly happy and deluded angels an opportunity of learning how to forsake the error of their ways. In a subsequent form of this curious legend, whose origin is at present unknown, he is said to have descended into hell with a similar object. See Professor Cowell in the _Indian Antiquary_ for 1879. [316] It will be observed that the old woman’s ‘Blackie’ could understand what was said to him, and make his own meaning understood; but he could not speak. [317] If _Muṇika_, the name of the Pig, is derived from the root MAR (B. R. No. 2)--as I think it must be, in spite of the single ṇ--it is a verbal noun derived from a past participle, meaning ‘cut into small pieces.’ The idea is doubtless of the small pieces of meat used for curry, as the Indians had no sausages. I could not dare to coin such a word as ‘Curry-bit-ling,’ and have therefore preserved the joke by using a word which will make it intelligible to European readers. This well-told story is peculiarly interesting as being one of those Indian stories which have reached Europe independently of both the ‘Kalilag and Dimnag’ and the ‘Barlaam and Josaphat’ literature. Professor Benfey (pp. 228-229 of his Introduction to the Pañca Tantra) has traced stories somewhat analogous throughout European literature; but our story itself is, he says, found almost word for word in an unpublished Hebrew book by Berachia ben Natronai, only that two donkeys take the place of the two oxen. Berachia lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century, in Provence.