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A warlike king sets out to bag another small kingdom for his realms, but a monkey gets him thinking.
The Jataka Tales are a collection of roughly fourth-century BC stories supposedly from the many previous lives of Gautama Buddha. Several tell, Aesop-like, how one may learn wisdom by observing the ways of the natural world around us. In this case, a belligerent monarch draws a timely lesson from the antics of a monkey.
John Wood shares the wonder of the Indian cobra’s hood, in science and in myth.
By profession, JG Wood was a clergyman, but he had a gift for making science accessible to ordinary people. From the early 1850s, he was in demand as an author and lecturer on natural history both at home and abroad: he delivered the prestigious Lowell Lectures in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883-84. In this passage, he takes a look at the hooded cobra, in the light of anatomy and of India’s sacred legends.
An ageing Heron finds himself a little too stiff to fish for himself, so he thinks of a way to get the fish to do it for him.
The Fables of Bidpai are morality tales similar to the animal fables of Aesop, with a touch of the Arabian Nights. They were first published in England in 1570, but originated in India, and spread to the West from an Arabic translation made by Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ (724-?759) of Basra. In this tale, retold for the sake of brevity, a Heron finds that dastardly plans have a way of backfiring.
A harassed mother Raven vows bloody revenge on a venomous Snake, but the wily old Jackal has a better idea.
The Fables of Bidpai are morality tales similar to the animal fables of Aesop, with a touch of the Arabian Nights. They were first published in England in 1570, but originated in India, and spread to the West from an Arabic translation made by Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ (724-?759) of Basra. In the tale below, retold for the sake of brevity, a distraught mother learns that justice doesn’t have to involve confrontation.
A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.
PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.
In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.
William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.
The lord of Benares is so partial to venison that fields lie fallow and marketplaces stand empty while his people catch deer for him.
The following tale comes from the collection known as the Jataka, a series of fables setting out the wisdom of Siddhartha Gautama, the fifth- or fourth-century BC teacher of enlightenment. This particular story is set in the deer park near Varanasi (Benares) in Uttar Pradesh where tradition says that Gautama Buddha first taught.