whole five books in his encyclopædic collection; and the absence from the Kathā-Sarit-Sāgara of the last two books would tend to show that when he wrote his great work the Pancha Tantra had not been composed, or at least had not reached the North of India.
Somadeva derived his knowledge of the three books he does give from the Vṛihat-Kathā, a work ascribed to Guṇādhya, written in the Paiṣāchī dialect, and probably at least as early as the sixth century.[1] This work, on which Somadeva's whole poem is based, is lost. But Dr. Bühler has lately discovered another Sanskrit poem, based on that earlier work, written in Kashmīr by Kshemendra at the end of the eleventh century, and called, like its original, Vṛihat-Kathā; and as Somadeva wrote quite independently of this earlier poem, we may hope that a comparison of the two Sanskrit works will afford reliable evidence of the contents of the Old Vṛihat-Kathā.[2]
I should also mention here that another well-known work, the Vetāla-Pañca-Vinsatī (the Twenty-five Tales of a Demon), is contained in both the Sanskrit poems, and was therefore probably also in Guṇādhya's collection; but as no Jātaka stories have been as yet traced in it, I have simply included it for purposes of
