BIDPAI (or PILPAY), FABLES OF  , the name given in the middle ages (from Sanskrit Vidya-pati, chief scholar) to a famous collection of Hindu stories . The origin of them is undoubtedly to be found in the Pancha Tantra, or Five Sections, an extensive body of early fables or apologues . A second collection, called the Hitopadesa, has become more widely known in Europe than the first, on which it is apparently founded . In the 6th century A.D., a translation into Pahlavi of a number of these old fables was made by a physician at the court of Chosroes I . Anushirvan, king of Persia . No traces of this Persian translation can now be found, but nearly two centuries later, Abdallah-ibn-Mokaffa translated the Persian into Arabic; and his version, which is known as the " Book of Kalilah and Dimna," from the two jackals in the first story, became the channel through which a knowledge of the fables was transmitted to Europe . It was translated into Greek by Simeon Sethus towards the close of the 11th century; his version, however, does not appear to have been retranslated into any other European language . But the Hebrew version of Rabbi Joel, made somewhat later, was translated in the 13th century into Latin by John of Capua, a converted Jew, in his Directorium vitae humanae (first published in 1480), and in that form became widely known . Since then the fables have been translated into nearly every European tongue . There are also versions of them in the modern Persian, Malay, Mongol and Afghan languages . See Wilson's analysis of the Pancha Tantra, in the Mem. of the Royal Asiat . Soc. i .

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Silvestre de Sacy's introduction to his edition of the Kalilah and Dimna (1816) ; articles by the same in Notices et Extr. des MSS. de la Bib. du Rai, vols. ix. and x . ; German translation by Philipp Wolff, Bid pal's Fabeln (2 vols., 2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1839); the Anvar-i Suheili, Persian version of the Fables, translated by E . B . Eastwick (Hertford, 1854); Benfey, Pantscha Tantra, German translation with important introduction (2 vols., Leipzig, 1859) ; other editions, by L . Fritze (ib . 1884) .and R . Schmidt (ib . 1901); Max Muller, Essays (Leipzig, 1872), vol. iii. pp . 303, &c,; J . Jacobs' edition of Sir T . North's Morall Philosophie of Doni, the earliest English version of the fables (London, 1888) ; T . G .

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Keith-Falconer, Kalilah and Dimnah, or the Fables of Bidpai (Cambridge, 1895), their history, with a translation of the later Syriac version and notes; Leopold Hervieux, Les Fabulistes Latins, &c. v . Jean de Capoue et ses derives (1899); E . G . Browne, Persian Literat . (1906), ii . 350 .