Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Reading Notes: Jataka Tales Part B

White elephant helping out the carpenters 
Some of the stories that interested me were the king's white elephant and the ox who never envied the pig. On both of the stories I wish there were a little more context to it to show us the moral. In the first one, elephant's parent goes and helps out the carpenters in return for food and so she also teaches son to go help out the carpenters so they can feed her in return. Then one day king comes and visits the forest and see the white elephant and falls in love with her. The king pays the prices to carpenters in return for the elephant, which they all happily agree. That's the end of the story and I was not really a big fan of it so I would change the way, where carpenters feels sorry for doing it and learn their lesson on not taking things for greed. In the second story, the ox is jealous of farmer feeding the pig his choices of food but his mom tells him that the ox is eating food for his death. The daughter of the farmer is about to get married so the farmer was trying to fatten the pig up for a big feast. The ox becomes more appreciative of eating just grass to live longer. I thought the story was a little short and blend so maybe I could recreated it by adding more details of the ox getting mad and test his limits to later regret his decision.



Bibliography: Jataka Tales by Ellen Babbitt

No comments:

Post a Comment

Reading Notes: The Life of Buddha Part B

In the second part of the reading Siddhartha sees the real truths about life. He thinks the world is all happy places, where everyone is joy...