Five Books for a Prince

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Panchatantra frames its animal fables inside a teaching story: a Sanskrit scholar named Vishnu Sharma is engaged to educate three unpromising young princes in the practical art of governance, niti, and undertakes to do it not through dry instruction but through five books of interlinked fables in which animals scheme, ally, betray and outwit one another, each story illustrating a lesson in strategy, trust or self-interest. The stories nest inside one another, a narrator animal within one fable telling a further fable to make its point, so that the collection is built from frame narratives at more than one level at once.