Indian Myths
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Indian Myths’
Peasie wants to visit her lonely father, but she can’t get her sister Beansie to come along with her.
This story comes from a collection of folktales from the Punjab, as told by Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) who spent twenty-two years in India. It reminds us that little acts of kindness bring their own rewards, so long as the rewards aren’t the reason that we do them.
A dozy rabbit gets an idea into his head and soon all the animals of India are running for their lives.
The following tale from the fourth-century BC Jataka Tales was told to illustrate how Hindu ascetics blindly copied one another’s eye-catching but useless mortifications; but it might just as well be applied to stock-market rumours or ‘project fear’ politics.
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.
A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.
Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.
In an enduring fable from the Kathasaritsagara, an Indian merchant explains how he acquired his nickname.
Gunadhya, sixth-century narrator of this tale from the Kathasaritsagara, was in Pratisthana (Paithan) watching little knots of men in the city conducting their business. They included bookies promising treasure to gamblers, but among the merchants was a man who had a better way to become rich.
The lovely Shakuntala is wooed by a great King, but almost at once he forgets her.
‘The Recognition of Shakuntala’ is a play by fifth-century Indian dramatist Kalidasa, derived from the ancient Mahabharata, and made popular in Georgian England by Calcutta judge William Jones. It tells of a shy young woman who is wooed and wedded by a great King, who afterwards cannot remember her at all.