Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara by Salomon Richard

Author:Salomon Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

A.THE STORY OF A RICH MAN

Thus is the tradition: There was in the city of Pāṭaliputra [a certain] monk. At that time, at that moment, to a certain man . . . the rich man Mahikoḍa. Thus it is to be recited.

No parallel has been identified for this extremely brief and apparently incomplete story, so that little can be made of it. The story is in effect intact but for one or two words, and nearly all of the words are at least more or less familiar and comprehensible. But the text provides only the setting, namely the city of Pāṭaliputra, the imperial capital of the Mauryan dynasty in northeastern India, and introduces three characters: a monk, another unidentified man, and apparently a rich man named Mahikoḍa. The missing portion probably contained a verb, of which the unidentified “certain man” was the object, and the rich man perhaps the subject. But we don’t know what was done to him, and for lack of any parallel or related text we have no way to guess what happened.

In any case, the presentation of this story is anomalous in several respects. It lacks a title heading at the beginning such as “The story of the previous life of so-and-so,” which most stories in this and the related collections have, and at the end it has neither the usual abbreviation formula nor a story number like all the others. According to the interpretation proposed by Lenz (2003, 146), this first story reflects a false start by the author, who had begun to write a set of stories but for some reason changed his mind about its contents after the first one, discarded it, and started a different set.

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