Reading Diary B: Twenty Jataka Tales

For Part B of this week's reading, I read the short story "The Swan Kingdom" out of Twenty Jataka Tales.  This story told of a swan community that lived in a beautiful lake in the Himalayas, led by a noble king and his loyal companion.  There is another king that wishes to draw this swan colony in so that he can talk to their king and he lures them in by building a beautiful lake that is even better than the one the swans live in.  He then sends out an invitation to all birds saying they can come live there and eventually word gets to the swan kingdom and they want to leave their lake and move to the new one.  The king's loyal companion warns him that the move might not be a good idea because they don't know what lies ahead, but they move anyways.  The swan king then gets caught in a trap and his companion stays with him while all the other swans flee.  The king that caught them is astonished by the loyalty and lets them go, parting on good terms.  It's a weird coincidence that earlier this week I chose to do a reading about a king that gets hurt and all of his subjects leave, and then this time I read a story about a king that gets caught and has one loyal subject remain with him, both ending with the person holding them captive feeling great admiration for their captive over this and letting them go.  The moral of this story was companionship and loyalty.

Reading Diary A: Twenty Jataka Tales

This week's first reading was over the story "The Tortoise and the Geese" from Twenty Jataka Tales.  In this short story, there is a tortoise who is asked by his two geese friends if he would come to the cave up in the mountains that they live in to stay with them.  He agrees to go and they carry him off into the air by placing a stick in his mouth and grabbing on to either side of the stick before flying off towards the mountains.  When they pass over a small town, children begin to laugh at the tortoise and this makes him angry; so angry that he cannot hold his tongue and begins to yell at them.  In doing so, he lets go of the stick and falls to the ground, landing in the king's court.  The king, who is described as a man with a very kind heart but far too wordy in the presence of others, then comes running out to see what all the commotion is about.  When he asks one of his advisers what happened, he explains that the tortoise could not resist from talking and came crashing to the ground because of it. The king has an epiphany and realizes this as a lesson for him to stop doing all of the talking when around others and from then on speaks only when necessary and says only words of wisdom.

Tortoise being carried off by the geese

Original Online Book Source

Reference: Twenty Jataka Tales, retold by Noor Inayat