Скачать или смотреть The Old Tiger and the Traveller -OU sem 1 New Syllabus 2025-26 Prose Unit 2

   • OU Sem 1 New Syllabus 2025-26 onwards  
Summary :_ Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938) was an American scholar of Sanskrit and Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and later at the University of California. Ryder translated many Sanskrit works into English such as
The Panchatantra
Hitopadesa
The Bhagavad Gita
Sudraka’s Mṛcchakaṭika మృచ్ఛకటికమ్‌ (The Little Clay Cart) Dandin’s Daśakumāracharitra (The Ten Princes)
and works of Kalidasa and Bhartrihari.
The story ‘The Old Tiger and the Traveller’ is from the Hitopadesa, originally written by Pandit Narayana, and translated into English by A.W. Ryder

The story “The Old Tiger and the Traveller” is a moral tale from the Hitopadesa. Hitopadesa means “good advice” or beneficial advice”. It was composed between the 9th and 10th centuries by Pandit Narayana. The story is set in a southern forest where an old tiger sits near a pond holding a golden bracelet. An old tiger, pretending to be pious, sits near a pond with a golden bracelet. He calls out to travellers, offering golden bracelet as a gift. Most people avoid him, but one greedy traveller is tempted. Although he suspects danger, his desire for the bracelet makes him take the risk.
The tiger says that in his youth he was wicked and cruel, but later a pious man taught him religion. Now, being old and toothless, he claims to practise charity and virtue. Eight cardinal virtues are mentioned by the old Tiger. The cardinal virtues mentioned are: gifts to God’s creatures, gifts to God, study, penance, self-restraint, absence of greed, lack of fraud, and patience. The first four may be practised outwardly without sincerity, but the last four are found only in those whose hearts are truly pure. The tiger claims to have developed charity, self-control, and mercy after turning religious.

The traveller, lured by greed, enters the pond to bathe before receiving the bracelet. Unfortunately, he gets stuck in the mud, and the tiger seizes the chance to kill and eat him. The moral of the story is that greed leads to destruction. Thus, the story warns us not to fall for temptations offered by untrustworthy people. The tiger’s behaviour can be seen in two ways. From a human moral perspective, it appears evil because he deceives and kills an innocent traveller through trickery. However, from the perspective of nature, it reflects natural law: a tiger is a predator, and it survives by killing weaker beings. The story uses the tiger symbolically to show that deceptive and greedy people in human society behave in the same way.