Tag Archives: fable

The Dojo Temple (Dojoji): A Japanese Legend

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 36
Occupation: Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/11/2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

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

Nationality: Iranian
Age: 54
Occupation: Compounding Pharmacist
Residence: Albuquerque
Performance Date: 3/17/19
Primary Language: Persian
Language: English, Spanish

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

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Beijing
Performance Date: 4/10/17
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

“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.

The Ungrateful Tiger

Nationality: American, Korean
Age: 22
Occupation: Account Executive
Residence: Seattle, WA
Performance Date: April 23, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

The 22-year-old informant was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. at a very young age. She chose to share this story because they are commonly told in Korean culture.

“So basically this tiger falls into this deep, deep pit. And he calls out for help and this rabbit comes, and the tiger’s like ‘Please help me! Please help me out of here!’ and the rabbit’s like, ‘No if I do, you’ll eat me.’ And the tiger’s like, ‘No no, I promise I won’t eat you!’ and the rabbit’s like ‘Are you sure? Do you promise?” and the tiger’s like, ‘Yes, I promise,’ so the rabbit agrees to help him. So he throws down this long vine and he the tiger uses it to climb back up. And when he gets back up, he’s like, ‘Ok now I’m going to eat you,’ and the rabbit’s like ‘Hey that’s not cool! You can’t do that. Let’s ask someone else their opinion,’ and the tiger’s like, ‘Fine, let’s ask someone else what they think.’ So this other animal–I forget what kind of animal it is–but some other animal comes along and is like, ‘Woah what’s going on here?’ and the rabbit’s like, ‘This tiger’s trying to eat me!’ and tries to explain what happened. And then, the rabbit’s like, ‘I know, I’ll just show you what happened. Tiger, can you show us what happened?’ And the tiger’s like ‘Yeah sure.’ and he jumps in the pit, and then they leave.”

I find this piece to be quite funny, but what I find interesting about it is the lesson to not be cruel or too foolish, as it will cause problems in one’s life, just like what happened to the tiger.

Panchatantra = Indian comic book

Nationality: Indian
Age: 20
Occupation: undergraduate student
Residence: New Delhi, India
Performance Date: 2017-3-18
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

Main piece:

“Panchatantra is a folktale comic book for kids created to teach morals and important life lessons. In one of the stories, there is a god/deity, who is disguised as a poor female street beggar. She goes to a rich family household and asks for food and money. They say no, so then she moves on to the village and goes to a poor couple’s house. The couple has like no food or anything but she asks for food and water. They give her one roti (which is like tortilla/bread) and water even though they had none for themselves. So then when the rich family and poor couple wake up, their lives are switched.

Background information (Why does the informant know or like this piece? Where or who did they learn it from? What does it mean to them?):

Informant said she got her Panchatantra from her aunt on her 4th birthday as a gift but it was very common and every kid owned it. Informant said that the story shows that no matter how much you have- a lot or a little- you should share with people. It teaches people to not be selfish and greedy.

Context (When or where would this be performed? Under what circumstance?):

It is read by kids as a comic book in India.

Personal Analysis:

The Panchatantra is like Aesop’s fables. It is a good way to combine something fun and educational. It is not education in a literal or academic sense, but it is one way that India teaches kids how to be generous. It shows the values of the nation that cares about giving rather than receiving.