Excerpt from The Ocean of Story, Vol. 9 of 10: Being C. H. Tawney"s Translation of Somadeva"s Katha Sarit Sagara (or Ocean of Streams of Story) Now Edited With Introduction, Fresh, Explanatory Notes and Terminal Essay
When Mr Penzer honoured me with an invitation to write a foreword to the ninth volume of this admirable work, I felt that it would be foolish presumption on my part to attempt to add to the learned and fascinating studies on different aspects of the Ocean of Story that have been contributed to the previous volumes by scholars of eminence and authority. But it may not perhaps be unwelcome to the western or eastern reader of the Ocean to consider for a while the influence which must have been exercised by this unique and marvellous collection of stories on the culture and ideas of the people for whom they were primarily strung together. It may also be worth while to examine the evidence afforded by it of life and society in India at a most interesting and elusive period of its history, a century before the establishment of a Muslim Kingdom at Delhi.
It is a well-known, but none the less remarkable, fact that for the Hindu there is no code or compendium either for religious dogma or for moral conduct. There is nothing of final authority to guide him like the Ten Commandments, the Gospels or the Qur"an. The Vedas contain little in the way of definite and concrete rules of belief and conduct, and, at the best, the teaching of the Vedas could have been familiar only to a microscopic minority of the population of India. The term "Sastras" is a generic expression which may be said to embrace the entire non-secular literature of Sanskrit; individual works included in the term Sastras have possessed authority only at different times, in different parts of India and among different sections of the population.
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