Hitopadesha

The Hitopadesha, meaning Beneficial Advice, is a Sanskrit collection of fables featuring human and animal characters, composed in India by an author identified in the text only as Narayana, whose introductory verses date the work to roughly the ninth or tenth century CE, though the earliest surviving manuscripts are believed to come from around the twelfth century. Narayana draws the great majority of his material, by some estimates around three-quarters of the work's content and roughly a third of its verses, directly from the earlier Panchatantra, adopting its device of a frame narrative enclosing embedded fables and openly acknowledging his debt to the older collection in his own introduction, while reorganizing the material into four divisions rather than the Panchatantra's five. Composed to convey maxims and practical wisdom on statecraft, friendship and worldly conduct in accessible, elegant language, the Hitopadesha became one of the most widely copied and translated works of Sanskrit literature in its own right.