Panchatantra Five Strategies Collection Of Animal Fables Complied Before Ad 500

The Panchatantra , ("Five Treatises") is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. The surviving work is dated to about 300 BCE, but the fables are likely much more ancient. The text's author is unknown, but has been attributed to Vishnu Sharma in some recensions and Vasubhaga in others, both of which may be fictitious pen names. It is likely a Hindu text, and based on older oral traditions with "animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine".It is "certainly the most frequently translated literary product of India", and these stories are among the most widely known in the world. It goes by many names in many cultures. There is a version of Panchatantra in nearly every major language of India, and in addition there are 200 versions of the text in more than 50 languages around the world. One version reached Europe in the 11th-century. To quote Edgerton (1924).

"Panchatantra is a fictional storybook written for children and consists of traditional folk tales. The stories are about the five ways in which human beings can achieve their goals in life. In the term, 'Panchatantra', Pancha means the number five and Tantra means strategies or ways... Some stories of Panchatantra are the most popular folk stories from ancient Indian literature. No one knows how old the stories of Panchatantra are but these stories are usually attributed to Vishnu Sharma."--Back cover

A collection of animal fables told by the Greek slave Aesop.

The Panchatantra is a collection of folktales and fables claimed to have been authored in Sanskrit over 2500 years ago by the famous Hindu Scholar Pandit Vishnu Sharma. It provides insight into human behaviour despite the fact that all the characters are from the animal realm. The precise date of the composition of the Panchatantra is unknown and ranges between 1200 BCE and 300 CE. Some researchers date him to the third century BCE.

Isaiah Berlin's classic essay on Tolstoy - an exciting new edition with new criticism and a foreword. 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' This fragment of Archilochus, which gives this book its title, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Tolstoy. There have been various interpretations of Archilochus' fragment; Isaiah Berlin has simply used it, without implying anything about the true meaning of the words, to outline a fundamental distinction that exists in mankind, between those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system (hedgehogs). When applied to Tolstoy, the image illuminates a paradox of his philosophy of history, and shows why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics. Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but he believed in being a hedgehog.

A collection of 40 tales of beast fables around a central political story.

Panchatantra is written in the form of a chain of simple stories, and each story has a moral & philosophical theme which has stood the test of time and so is true even in morden times-an age of atomic fear and madness.