Ceremony o wysiga va I. Introduction. 7 In the stories of our book the Bharatakas are depicted as fools of every kind. They are represented as intellectually as well as morally depraved creatures. Neither do they understand Sanskrit, nor the vernacular of their own country. Their mind is slow, their intellectual capacity is generally most restricted. Whenever they make an effort towards thinking, a striking failure and a misfortune for themselves is the pitiable result. In story 5, our author tells us that in such and such a village the inhabitants were very dull and by this selfsame reason devoted to the Bhara- takas; and from no. 26 (transl. Indische Märchen p. 166 f.) we learn that, on receiving a letter which his gurus believed to have written in Sanskrit, a Shaiva minister thinks, within himself: 'What asses are my spiritual fathers!' But in the same time the Bharatakas are described as debauchees, as impostors and swindlers, as liars and thieves. Thus the book proves to be a satirical pamphlet directed against the Shaivas. It is by no means 'a collection or trans- lation of stories bearing the character of our household tales current among the population', as Weber thinks (see Ind. Str. i, p. 245). Pavolini holds that the whole collection is derived from some original composed in Prakrit or in some modern vernacular (1. c., p. 52). This is, of course, quite impossible because of the stories which ridicule the Bharatakas on account of their want of learning: ep. nos. 5, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 31, 32. The author, and his time. The author of the book can only have been an enemy of these monks and of Shiva worship (ep. our tale 9, where the author says that the representation of a drama glorifying Shiva and his deeds is such as to give pleasure to the dullards'), and his intention must have been to oust them from their influence and from the favour of both the learned and the not learned population. Hence he can only have been a Jain, writing in the service of his ecclesia militans. Regarded from this point of view his booklet turns out to be a very clever and witty device, more effective at all events than a lot of big volumes of learned polemics would have been. It is well known that the Jains were antagonists of the Shaivas, because they hated the bloody and orgiastic rites of Shaiva worship; see e. g. the beginning of Manikya Suri's Yashodharacharitra (Hertel, Jinakirtis Geschichte von Pala und Gopala, Saxon Berichte 69 (1917), 4. Heft, p. 81 f.). On the other hand, we have in the 244th story of the Katharatnakara a direct testimony of the hostility which animated the Bharatakas against the Jains. Hemavijaya tells us that the Bharatakas of the town Onkara in Malwa did not allow the Jain community to build a temple, until Siddbasena Divā- kara succeeded in persuading King Shrivikrama to permit its con- struction.