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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
PART B The gentle conclusion of the story has obviously been added only when the small poem containing nothing specific Buddhistic was made a Jātaka. In the Jātaka the role of the Bodhisattva could only be attributed to Takkāriya. By this fact, however, the sacrificing of the Purohita by Takkāriya became excluded. The narrator even avoids to speak of the killing of the sacrificial animal used instead of the Purohita. He makes Takkāriya sacrifice a ‘ dead ’ ram (mataṁ eḷakaṁ). The word Takkāriya assigned as a name to the pupil of the Purohita appears in the first two Gāthās. In G. 1 the Purohita laments: aham eva dubbhāsitaṁ bhāsi bālo â I myself as a fool have spoken bad words like the frog in a forest, who calls the serpent to the spot. Takkāriya [1], I fall down in this pit. Indeed, it is not good to speak at improper time”[2]. Takkariya answers:
pappoti machcho ativelabhāṇī
âSo the man, who speaks at improper time, experiences death, as well as grief and lamentation. You ought to blame yourself in this case[3], oh teacher, if they bury you in the pitâ. The form Takkāriye, for which the Siṁhalese manuscripts read Takkāriyo in the text as well as in the commentary, offers difficulties. The commentator had undoubtedly the reading Takkāriye before his eyes, as he explains the word as feminine: tasa Takkāriyāti itthiliṅgaṁ nāma. This explanation is of course impossible. I cannot follow Hertel[4] either, when he expresses the view that the person addressed was originally a female, perhaps the wife of the Purohita. From the stanza of the response it is apparent that the Purohita is the teacher of Takkāriya. Takkāriya therefore must have been his pupil. The right explanation of the form, as I think, has been gives by Geiger (Pāli Gr., p. 81). He takes it as a ‘Magadhism’ and quotes as a parallel Bhesike which appears in D. I, 225 f. as a vocative of the name Bhesika. The name Takkāriya is somewhat striking. A gotra of this name is not known. Inscriptions from the middle ages, however, mention on different occasions a place Tarkāri or Tarkārikā, instead of which sometimes Ṭakkārikā is written. It is a centre of Vedic studies from where many families of brahmins went to the East and South[5]. The place was situated in Madhyadeśa in the vicinity of Śrāvastī. That means a region which fell certainly into the mental horizon of the author of the Gatha
We therefore may suppose that Tarkāri was a settlement of brahmins many centuries
before it appears in the inscriptions mentioned, the inhabitants of which called themselves
with pride Tarkarikas ot Takkariyas.
[1]I take this as a vacate, see below. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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