The Kathāsaritsāgara ("Ocean of the Streams of Stories") (Devanagari: कथासरित्सागर) is a famous 11th-century collection of Indian legends and folk tales as retold in Sanskrit by the Shaivite Somadeva from Kashmir.

He tells us that his magnum opus was written (sometime between 1063-81 CE) for the amusement of Sūryavatī, wife of King Ananta of Kashmir, at whose court Somadeva was poet.

The frame story is the narrative of the adventures of Naravahanadatta, son of the legendary king Udayana, his romances with damsels of great beauty and wars with enemies.

Somadeva declares that his work is a faithful though abridged translation of a much larger collection of stories known as the Bṛhatkathā, or Great Tale written in the lost Paisaci dialect by Guṇāḍhya.

Kathāsaritsāgara consists of 18 lambhakas ("books") of 124 taramgas (chapters called as "waves") and approximately 22,000 ślokas (distichs) in addition to prose sections.

Somadeva’s narrative captivates both by its simple and clear, though very elegant, style and diction and by his skill in drawing with a few strokes pictures of types and characters taken from the real every-day life.

Hence it is that even in the miraculous and fantastical facts and events that make up the bulk of the main story and of a great deal of the incidental tales the interest of the reader is uninterruptedly kept.

His lively and pleasant art of story-telling — though now and then encumbered with inflatedness or vitiated by far-fetched false wit — is enhanced also by his native humor and the elegant and pointed sentences strewn about here and there with a good taste.

The marriage of the latter with various damsels of terrestrial or celestial origin, and his elevation to the rank of king of the Vidyadharas, a class of heavenly spirits, are the leading topics of most of the books; but they merely constitute the skeleton of the composition, the substance being made up of stories growing out of these circumstances, or springing from one another with an ingenuity of intricacy which is one of the great charms of all such collections.

[3] The first book (Kathapitha) is introductory, and refers the origin of the tales contained in the collection to Shiva, who, it is said, related them in private conversation with his wife, Parvati, for her entertainment.

One of the attendants of the deity, Pushpadanta, took the liberty of listening, and he repeated them, under the seal of secrecy, to his wife, Jaya, a sort of lady’s maid to the goddess.

Jaya takes an opportunity of intimating to her mistress that she is acquainted with the stories narrated by Shiva to the great mortification of Parvati who had flattered herself that they had been communicated to her alone.

Parvati thereupon pronounces an imprecation upon Pushpadanta, condemning him to be born upon the earth as a man; and she sentences his friend Malyavan, who had ventured to intercede for him, to a like destination.

Parvati tells the culprits that they shall resume their celestial condition when Pushpadanta, encountering a yaksha, a follower of Kubera, the god of wealth, doomed for a certain time to walk the earth, as a pishacha or goblin, shall recollect his own former state, and shall repeat to the pishacha the stories he overheard from Shiva; and when Malyavan, falling in with the Pisacha, shall hear from him again the stories that his friend Pushpadanta had narrated.

The second book (Kathamukha) commences that part of the original narrative which was supposedly not consumed, and records the adventures of Udayana, king of Kosambi, a prince of great fame in Sanskrit plays and poems, and his marriage with Vasavadatta, princess of Ujjain.

The fifth book (Caturdarika) records the adventures of Saktivega who became king of the heavenly beings termed Vidyadharas, a class of spirits who reside upon the loftiest peaks of the Himalaya mountains.

In the next book (Ratnaprabha) Naravahanadatta marries Ratnaprabhā a Vidyadhari who was prophesied to be his bride; the wedding is celebrated at the palace of her father Hemaprabha, on one of the snow-crowned summits of the Himalaya.

When the married couple return to Kosambi the young bride persuades her husband to throw open the doors of the inner quarters, and allow free access to his friends and associates.

The youths reject her advances; she wakes the genie who is going to put them to death, but the rings are produced in evidence against the unfaithful wife, and she is cast away with the loss of her nose.

In (Suratamanjari), the sixteenth book, Udayana, resigns his throne to Gopalaka, the brother of his wife Vasavadatta, and, accompanied by his wives and ministers, goes to Mount Kalanjana.

Gopalaka, inconsolable for the loss of his brother-in-law, soon relinquishes his regal state of Kosambi to his younger brother, Palaka, retires to the White Mountain, and spends the rest of his days in the hermitage of Kashyapa.

We have then an account of the son of Palaka falling in love with a young girl of low caste, a Chandali, and different stories illustrative of odd couples.

The curse was to terminate when eighteen thousand Brahmins should eat in his house; and this being accomplished, Matanga is restored to his rank, and his daughter is judged a fit bride for the son of the king.

The last book (Visamasila) has Vikramaditya or Vikramasila, son of Mahendraditya, king of Ujjain, for its hero, and describes his victories over hostile princes, and his acquirement of various princesses.

[5] Apart from the Kashmir redactions there exists a Sanskrit version of Guṇāḍhya’s work, bearing the title Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha, i.e. the “Great Tale: Verse Epitome.” Only about six of the twenty-six lābhas are currently available.

Its discoverer and editor, M. Félix Lacôte, had published (Essai sur Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā, Paris, 1908) along with the text an elaborate discussion of all the questions of higher criticism relating to the Kathāsaritsāgara and the other recensions.

It lacks many of the subsidiary tales in the Kathāsaritsāgara, and thus the main narrative stands out concerned predominantly with the actual adventures of Naravāhanadatta, a hero of Guṇāḍhya’s own invention.

In its preface, ʿAbbasi mentions that he was assigned to rewrite an earlier version “of the book barhatkata […] which the Kashmirian Brahmin Sumdevbat […] had shortened” and which “someone had undertaken during Zayn al-‘Abidin’s reign”, being fraught with Arabic expressions, in a more readable style.” In conformity with the Sanskrit text, the Persian adaptation is likewise divided into eighteen main chapters, called nahr (rivers), each subdivided into several mauj (waves).

The translator-compiler ‘Abbāsī remarks, for example, that “this story is elaborated upon in [other] Indian books”, or comments on certain passages by adding: “[…] according to the sayings of the people of India […].” The second type of strategy encountered is that of inserting poetic quotations from the pool of Persian poetry such as Gulistan, Divan-i Hafiz, Divan-i Salman-i Savaji, Manzumat-i Sharaf al-Din Yazdi, Nizami's Khusrau-u-Shirin, Makhzan al-Asrar, Haft paykar, and various others.

It was this text which C. H. Tawney used for his excellent translation (Ocean of the River of Streams) published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the Bibliotheca Indica, 1880-1884 (the index not appearing till 1887).