Jataka Tales: Six Fables from Old India
Six tales from the Jataka, the ancient Buddhist stories of the Buddha's earlier lives, retold for children: a giant crab, a monkey who outwits a crocodile, two parrots, some very unhelpful monkey gardeners, quails who work together, and a quail too clever for a falcon. By W. H. D. Rouse (1897). A public-domain classic, from The Giant Crab and Other Tales from Old India.
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हिन्दी में पढ़ेंजातक कथाएँ · वही कहानी How it begins Once upon a time there was a lake in the mountains, and in that lake lived a huge Crab. I daresay you have often seen crabs boiled, and put on a dish for you to eat; and perhaps at the seaside you have watched them sidling away at the bottom of a pool. Sometimes a boy or girl bathing in the sea gets a nip from a crab, and then there is squeaking and squealing. But our Crab was much larger than these; he was the largest Crab ever heard of; he was bigger than a dining-room table, and his claws were as big as an armchair. Fancy what it must be to have a nip from such claws as those!Well, this huge Crab lived all alone in the lake. Now the different animals that lived in the wild mountains used to come to that lake to drink; deer and antelopes, foxes and wolves, lions and tigers and elephants. And whenever they came into the water to drink, the great Crab was on the watch; and one of them at least never went up out of the water again. The Crab used to nip it with one of his huge claws and pull it under, and then the poor beast was drowned, and made a fine dinner for the big Crab. Keep reading →About this story
Six tales from the Jataka, the ancient Buddhist stories of the Buddha’s earlier lives, retold for children: a giant crab, a monkey who outwits a crocodile, two parrots, some very unhelpful monkey gardeners, quails who work together, and a quail too clever for a falcon.
W. H. D. Rouse, an English classical scholar, published this retelling in 1897 in Stories from the Jataka. The Jataka contain over five hundred tales, in which the Buddha-to-be appears as a king, a deer or a monkey, learning compassion and wisdom. They are some of the oldest collected stories in the world.
- Themes
- Wisdom, cleverness, teamwork, compassion
- Good for
- Short stories for reading aloud
- Worth noticing
- How each story ends by saying who the Buddha was in it.