My favorite stories on the first half of the unit of the
Jataka Tales (Babbitt) were The Foolish, Timid Rabbit and The Banyan Deer. I thought The Foolish, Timid Rabbit, was the
funniest reading in the first half of the readings. A rabbit had a nightmare
that the world was going to break apart and when he woke up to a loud thump
from a coconut being dropped behind him, he jumped up and screamed, “The earth is breaking up!” As he ran he continued
to yell the same thing over and over. This caused all other animals to join in
because they thought that the earth was breaking up because everyone was
running and yelling. The Lion doesn’t follow the crowd and stopped the rally to
find the rabbit that started all the commotion. Once he found the rabbit, the
rabbit took him to the place where he thought the earth was breaking up and both
saw the coconut. The Lion called him foolish and he was mistaken that the earth
was breaking because of the sound of the falling coconut.
In the Banyan Deer story, there was a King who wanted to hunt deer.
Once his citizens got all the deer together in a gated trap, the two clans of
deer’s kings would send sacrifices to be killed by the king each day. One day, the name of a mother deer was drawn in the lot to be sacrificed. She begged to the kings to spare her life
since she had a fawn. So one of the deer kings went and laid his head down on a
rock, making an easy target for the king. The king thought it was odd and
questioned the deer king for his actions. The deer told him he would rather sacrifice
himself than a mother. The king found this act so admirable that he let all the
deers go and didn’t want to hunt them anymore.
A reddish bunny in Ysitien lemmikki Zoo taken by Tiia Monto (2011)
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