Epics of India

Image Source: Mother Deer and Fawn by Dave Bonta, via f lickr In "The Banyan Deer" there are two herds of deer, the Banyan Deer and the Monkey Deer, and each herd has a king. The human king of the country the deer live in loves deer meat, and hunts them regularly. However, when the king hunts he takes many townspeople with him and they are not able to do their work or complete their chores. This irritates the townspeople, and they decide to make a fenced in area that will hold all the deer so the king can easily get deer whenever he wants deer meat without taking any townspeople. Once the deer are in the park, the king or his chef come to hunt the deer regularly, but they usually end up injuring more than the one deer they kill. The two deer kings agree to a plan to minimize the loss to their herds by one herd sending a deer to be killed one day and the other the next alternating each day going forward. This system works until one day, a mother Monkey Deer with ...

The Silk Merchants by Edwin Lord Weeks, via Wikimedia Commons In "The Merchant of Seri," there are two merchants. One is a good and honest man; the other is a greedy and dishonest one. Both merchants entered a town one day and divided the streets evenly between them. A poor old woman and her granddaughter lived in a house along one of the streets assigned to the greedy merchant. The poor woman did not think they had any money or valuable belongings even though their family was once very rich. When the greedy merchant walked by the poor woman's house her granddaughter begged her to buy something for her. When she told her granddaughter that they did not have any money or even something to barter with, the granddaughter insisted the grandmother try to trade an old bowl they never used. The old woman didn't think the bowl was anything special, she just kept it because her late husband used to eat out of it. However, she brought it to the greedy merchant and a...