The european literature between indian fable religious and defrauded Buddha

Abstract

The objective here is to present that, in most of Europe, in the medieval and modern periods, the imaginary impressions of Indian fables and the religious life of Buddha, which had already existed for almost two thousand years before in Greece, became recurring. All of the medieval novels, for example, with their heroic knights, as well as modern fables, have a significant mark, rather plagiarism, of popular or classical Indian literature. In fact, as we methodologically base ourselves in the history of ideas, we find that India was (with his magical imaginary) the faraway and literary source of the tales, the fables, the romances of chivalry etc., which gave much charm to medieval European times. This is confirmed by Theodor Benfey, one of the translators of the Pañcatantra, our main Indian fable exposed here, who pronounced the dictum, in 1859, that most of the world's fables, which were produced in the West, had originated in magical world of India, of which a small number had actually arrived in Europe as oral stories even before the tenth century.