Alright this is a story about the lion who laughed, because the lion laughed, this is about a lion who laughed. The lion is a very cruel king, he gathers all the animals in the forest, he is a very cruel, cruel king! So all the animals gather in the forest, he goes “Everyone has to laugh at somebody who tells me a joke.” He pulls the tortoise up, the tortoise has to tell everyone a joke. If everyone laughs, he survives. If one person does not laugh, then he dies. He gets eaten by the lion. So! The lion is ready for the tortoise to make a joke and everybody laughs! The tortoise tells the funniest joke in the world, the lion is laughing his ass off, except the sloth. The sloth has not said a word, he is not laughing. So naturally the lion eats the turtle, okay? Or the tortoise sorry. Next day in the forest the lion gathers everybody, he’s a very cruel king, and he goes “Oh my god, some animal’s gotta tell a joke, or I am gonna eat an animal if everybody laughs then the animal is saved! If one person doesn’t laugh then damn. . . I gotta eat the animal.” So it happens to be a kangaroo. The kangaroo’s all nervous and he knows he is going to die and he’s the worst joker in the world. He tells a joke and the lion just stares at him, everybody is just like “what the hell was that?” No laughing. Uhh. . . but he gets eaten, he gets slobbered up but! The kangaroo is dead because he just got eaten but the sloth is laughing his ass off, and everyone is like “Yo, why are you laughing? You were the only one that didn’t laugh yesterday, now you’re the only one laughing today. What’s going on?” And he goes “Ahaha I’m not laughing at the kangaroo joke, I was laughing at the tortoise joke from yesterday. That shit was hilarious!” So the moral of the story is. . .don’t be a sloth.
Tag Archives: fable
Lazy Donkey Tale
Context: The following is an account from the informant, my mother. It was told casually as both entertainment and to teach a lesson at the same time
Background: The informant heard this from her grandmother in her mountain village. They remember this for the entertainment value that the story provided as well as for the moral advice.
Main piece:
There was once a merchant who loaded his salt onto his donkey and took it to the market every day. On the way, they had to go through the forest and pass over a small stream. One day, the donkey slipped as it was crossing that stream, and the salt on its back dissolved in the water. As it stood up, the donkey noticed with glee that its heavy load had lightened considerably.
Remembering this the crafty donkey made a plan. From that day on, every time he crossed the stream, the donkey purposely dove into the stream and pretended it was an accident. However, the merchant understood what the donkey was doing, and one day he loaded the donkey up with cotton instead of salt. When they reached the stream, the donkey once again plunged into the water. This time, however, his burden was increased several times over, and he was forced to continue with the sopping wet cotton on his back.
By the time that the donkey reached the market, it could barely walk. The next day, the merchant put salt on the donkey’s back yet again. However, the donkey didn’t fall into the stream this time but passed over it without issue. It had learned its lesson from the previous day and didn’t try to act up out of laziness again.
Analysis: This fable is similar to many others with its inclusion of animals as characters and a negative characteristic resulting in a bad outcome, leading to the learning of a lesson. Although it is a specific version of a story, this seems very similar to any such story that might have been told around the world to children in order to teach them not to try to take advantage of things and be lazy, or else there may be consequences.
The Dojo Temple (Dojoji): A Japanese Legend
The following is a conversation with SS that details her interpretation of the Japanese legend about the Dojo Temple (Dojoji in Japanese).
SS: The story is about the Dojo temple; the title comes from a temple that forbid women from entering. Women were considered to pollute the sacred religious space. There’s a story that surrounds this temple where at a nearby, I think it was an inn, a woman was running the inn, you know, like, a little house that she was letting people stay at and she’s running it, a beautiful monk comes, and they fall in love, or maybe not exactly in love, because she seems to be really interested in him and he promises her that he will come back after he goes to this religious pilgrimage to Dojoji, this temple. Well, it turns out that he was just using that as an excuse because he got scared of her, so he goes away. But the woman gets really angry when she finds this out and turns into a serpent and then chases the guy until he gets to the temple and hides in this, kind of like, bell, and the serpent coils around the bell and burns him to death. So, there’s a lot of variations of the story but this is like the main part. So, you can see the story can be very dramatic and the Japanese perform it a lot, so you can see it in Kabuki theater, Noh theater, puppet theater, etc., etc.
EK: Would you say this is a legend or more of just a story?
SS: Well, it’s kind of hard to say. It’s been retold a lot in narrative form, performance, and so on, it’s all over the place, it’s been around from medieval to early modern Japan, which is from like eleventh century to 1868. It first appears in a religious text, so it could be a story that was made up to alert men of the danger of women, that they kind of pollute the sacred space. But then people became fascinated in the serpent itself. So, like in artworks, they’re not at all interested in the moral of the story that was important for probably the religious community very early on, but [instead] in the serpent that keeps on becoming this dramatic highlight.
EK: Where did you first hear this?
SS: I mean it’s one of those works that you read in school, like, one of those works that keeps coming up when you’re teaching pre-modern literature. It’s just all over the place. It’s actually associated with a specific region, like there’s and actual temple and a space, so I think, there are lots of different ways to access or come in contact with it. I grew up in Japan too, so I also know the story pretty well.
My Interpretation:
I believe the story that SS is a legend, in that it has questions of factuality but occurs in the real world. It seems that there are several variations of this story out there as well. SS noted that its origins are in religious texts and it’s also told by word-of-mouth, as well as performed in many different Japanese theaters, all of which I’m sure have their own interpretations or performances of the story. It seems that back when the story was first thought up, women were not thought of very highly of, as the legend presents the woman as pollution to sacred spaced, as well as a serpent creature. A serpent symbolic of being sneaky and deceitful, like the snake in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
I suppose that this could have been fable at the time for men to hear in order for them to watch out for women who would “cause” them cheat on their wives or manipulate them into doing bad things. Overall, I think it’s an easy legend to repeat, so although there is most likely lots of variation to the story, the way it flows has helped the main plot remain similar over thousands of years.
Persian Sleeping Beauty
Main Piece (direct transcription):
Dad: Iranians believe that if something is predicted, it will happen. There was a king, and he had a son. Somebody came, and told him that that boy… It’s the same thing as Disney, the same concept, do you remember…
Me: Sleeping Beauty?
Dad: Yes, with the spinning wheels. In our story, the king had a son, his only son, and a magician told him that his son would be bitten by a scorpion and would die. The king told all his people to kill all the scorpions and took his son to an island where there were no scorpions. He was guarded by many servants, and when the son was older, he was sitting by the beach with one of his servants, and he asked the servant,
“Why did my dad do all of this for me?”
The servant told him what happened. And the son said,
“But I’ve never even seen a scorpion. What does it look like?”
The servant drew the picture of a scorpion in the sand, and it came to life. The scorpion then stung the son and killed him.
Context: The informant, my father, is a pharmacist who was born in Shiraz, Iran. He moved to the United States after growing up in Iran, and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His first language is Farsi, his second is Spanish, and his third is English. He lived in Spain for several years before moving to the United States, and therefore has collected folklore from his time in these different countries throughout his lifetime. My dad was telling me about different Iranian folktales, since my dad was originally born and raised in Iran. We were originally talking about superstitions, and he decided to tell me this story. The moral of the story, he said, was that “if it has to be, it will be”, and that we could not escape our fate.
My Thoughts:
I thought this story was particularly interesting, because it had the same basic plot as Sleeping Beauty. Since I grew up with Disney, and know the story of Sleeping Beauty well, my dad did not even need to get very far into the story before I made the immediate connection between the two. I thought it was funny how my dad, before even really starting the story, asked me if I could already see the connection between his story and Sleeping Beauty. Being from Iran, he is not as familiar with the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and he knows many of his European fairy tales through Disney movies that he watched with me and my brother as we were growing up. My dad had never told me this Persian tale before this moment, and so I was unaware that there was an Iranian equivalent to the Sleeping beauty story in their culture.
For another version of this tale, please see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Little Briar-Rose (1857), which can be found here
Governor of the Southern Tributary State – Chinese Fable
“So this ancient Chinese fable is based around Bhuddist and Daoist morals. It’s called the Governor of the Southern Tributary State. So this man Chunyu Fen was an officer in the army that was dismissed for poor conduct and over-drinking. Disgruntled by this, he basically drinks himself into oblivion and falls asleep one day under a tree where he dreams messenger come and take him to the kingdom of Ashendon. The king offers his daughter hand in marriage and they get married and he’s really enjoying his new life of splendor and luxury. He eventually moves to this Southern Tributary State which is really prosperous and when he got there all the people were building monuments for him and singing praises. Until one day, the kingdom was invaded and he lost his land and his wife died shortly after. So he returned to the palace and his morale is very low. There was a prophecy that the kingdom of Ashendon would end by cause of some outside person. Chenyun was getting a lot of attention when he was in the palace, so the king grew suspicious of the prophecy and told him to leave. But when Chenyun was first told to go back to his normal world, he didn’t understand that this wasn’t the normal world and had to be reminded that he came from the world of men. And on his way out he’s super disappointed and all the grim surroundings picks up from underneath the tree and he realizes only a few hours had passed. He goes to try and find the kingdom under the tree and when he looks it’s just this mound of earth with ants. When he looks at the mound of earth, everything really resembles the kingdom and the palace itself and the southern state that he governed. When he wakes up in the morning, the whole thing is washed away.”
My informant is from Beijing. She lived there all her life before moving to America for USC. She told me that in China she learned a lot of different fables in school. Fables were popular because it taught students how to read while also teaching them valuable life lessons. I think that the moral of this particular story is that power is just an illusion. It’s about living a life of balance, simplicity, and no attachments–specifically to the physical world. These lessons are taught in the form of a cautionary dream, warning the protagonist of what could be his future if he doesn’t change his perspective and attitude.