"'Fearing that the sky might fall down,
"'the lapwing rests with feet stretched up,
"'Who in the world is not conceited
"'O'er the image he creates of himself!'"
The Pancatantra is a very, very old book, and its author, much like Homer, is probably more a myth himself than an actual person. If he ever existed he would have lived well over a thousand years ago, and his medium of composition would have been, according to tradition at least, Sanskrit.
The content of The Pancatantra (or "Panchatantra") is a lot easier to describe than its origins. It is a book (or series of books) written for the instruction of princes in the art of statecraft, with its narratives consisting of animal stories which are nested one inside the other. It bears a lot of similarities to The One Thousand and One Nights, a much later work which was almost certainly influenced by The Pancatantra.
Visnu Sarma's (or "Vishnu Sharma") work is divided into five sections, each focusing on a particular aspect of a ruler's function and duties. Each section contains a framing narrative in which the animal (and occasionally human) characters contend with one another, with various characters interrupting the framing narrative to offer stories or parables which illuminate whatever point is being made. It can be a dizzying read at times, and it's often hard to remember who's talking, or which sub-narrative is being discussed. The Pancatantra requires a lot of concentration from its reader, and I can't say that I was always up to the task.
This book is also, it must be admitted, extremely misogynistic. The female characters in the Pancatantra are almost always lascivious, deceitful and easily duped, while most of the male characters, when exhibiting similar failings, are always given the benefit of the doubt. The status of women in whatever society or societies gave birth to The Pancatantra must have been low indeed, and this low regard for the female sex often mediates against whatever wisdom The Pancatantra's stories are trying to impart.
On top of all this there's the problem of extracting some kind of insight from what is, at its heart, an extremely contradictory work. For every "thou shalt" offered by its characters there's an equally appealing "thou shalt not," and one can't help but wonder what people in ancient times would have made of The Pancatantra beyond the weird interest to be found in stories of men imitating gods, gods imitating men, and lion kings beset by bad councilors.
As someone with an interest in Indian religion and philosophy who's also read The Upanishads, The Mahabharata and similar works, I can't say that The Pancatantra is required reading. It does shed a certain light on several works of world literature that came after it, and I did find parts of it memorable, but I wouldn't say that it was, on the whole, worth the effort.
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