The idea of stringing a number of stories together by putting them in a frame as in Boccaccio's Decamerone, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Basile's Pentamerone, and so on down to Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Stevenson, is one that is distinctly to be traced to the East in the Fables of Bidpai, the book of Sindibad, and the Arabian Nights. The last is late, and was influenced by the others,[1] but the other two books which went through much the same history are offshoots of Buddhism, and in the case of Bidpai's Fables we have seen how the idea of a frame arose in the Jatakas or Birth Stories of Buddha. It is in the tendency to collect all the "good things" of India about the great exemplar of good in India that we must see the origin of the literary device of "the frame," which has done so much to keep intact the book we have been discussing during its long travels across the ages. Considering all these
- ↑ Professor de Goeje has made out a plausible case for tracing the frame story of the Thousand and One Nights to the story of Esther (Ency. Brit., sub voce), as Shahzará, is mentioned by Firdausi as a Jewish wife of Artaxerxes I. But the idea of a "frame" must have been suggested by the Indian books.
Ummaga-Jataka contains 150 stories. But the vogue of the "frame" was due to Buddhism.
