It is not a literal translation from the famous Sanskrit works Panchatantra and Hitophadesha but rather was written after the stories had functioned as folktales for many years, which explains why the work now has typical Javanese features, such as Javanese names for some of the characters and animals, which are not found in the Indian literature. This course of development is what makes these tales so fresh and original, and yet so wise.

The Indian fable book the Panchatantra is well known in Malay literature. It arrived in the Malay countries from two sources: from South India came the original Hindu version in a popularized form, and from the world of Islam came the original Middle Persian version of Bidpai, probably in the Arabic translation by Ibn Mukaffa under the title Kalila dan Dimna. The name Dimna comes from an older ‘Damina’, a derivative of the Sanskrit word ‘Damanaka’, which referred to the slanderous and greedy jackal, the storyteller’s personification of evil. The framework of the story follows.

A merchant traveling with an ox wagon got stuck on a muddy path in the hills. The ox seemed to have broken a leg, so the merchant had to leave him behind. Abandoned, the ox found plenty of fresh grass in the woods, so he grew fat and his wound soon healed.

In the woods there lived an old lion, with whom two jackals kept company. They fancied themselves to be the king’s councilors, although they were nothing but parasites who picked the bones of the lion’s victims. Their names were Karatka and Damanaka in the Sanskrit original (Kalila and Damina in the Syrian and Arabic versions). One day, the lion heard the ox lowing and was frightened. One of the jackals told him the story of the fox who was frightened by the noise of a drum hanging in a tree which was being banged around by the wind—implying that one need not fear all noisy things.

The old Indonesian version differs from the Middle Eastern one. The Arabic Kalila wa Damina was perhaps not directly translated into Malay; it became very popular in India during the period of the Islamic princes in Delhi and other centers. There, it was translated back into Persian—the literary Persian of the sixteenth century. The School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London possesses an exquisitely illustrated manuscript of that period, in Persian, from India. It may well have been this Persian text from which the Malay translation was made. Its title is Anwar-e-Suheyli (Lights of Canopus). We should not be misled by Sir Richard Winsted’s English translations from Malay, because those stories were translated into Malay from Dutch by Gonggryp.