忍辱仙人説話

抄録

The Kṣāntivādin legend is a family of stories about a preacher and practitioner of forbearance whose limbs and other body parts were cut off by a cruel king named Kalab(h)u (and the analog thereof) or Kali. We can find this tale in many Buddhist texts, both in Pāli and Sanskrit literature, and also in the Chinese translation scriptures. There has been no study that tried to gather parallel texts thoroughly and to compare motifs in an exhaustive manner. Therefore, this article aims to present a list of complete parallel texts of the Kṣāntivādin legend, and to represent the correlation among each text by a classification diagram. To sum up the main points of the motif comparisons, we can conclude that the Kṣāntivādin legend is largely separated into two categories. The first group says that the former birth of the cruel king was Devadatta, and the second Kauṇḍinya, and the latter has the unique plot of milk which has flowed out from the wound instead of blood.