Week 5 Reading Notes A: Bidpai's Fables

King Dabshalim visits Bidpai to learn the fables of Kalila on Wikimedia

For this week’s reading, I read The Fables of Bidpai. These are like the Indian version of Aesop’s fables. I was thinking this as I read, and some of the explanatory notes suggest that Aesop really did draw inspiration from these stories. Overall, these stories are longer than Aesop’s fables, and where Aesop usually explicitly states the moral at the end of his tales or has one of the characters speak it, Bidpai usually does not state his moral. Something that I like about these fables as compared to Aesop is that Bidpai uses a wider range of characters and situations. Many of his fables are about people, where we usually do not read about humans in Aesop’s. For me, this makes reading these tales more of an experience that I can relate to.

A lot of these stories are about either reward or punishment. The Rustic and the Nightingale is a tale of a bird who has destroyed some of a man’s roses. The man is going to lock her away forever, then has a change of heart and forgives her. For this nicety, the bird directs him to a pot of gold. On the other hand, The Rich Man and the Bundle of Wood is about a rich, stingy old man who does not care about his poor neighbors. His house burns down, and he is then poor.

In the three tales about apes, I like how the same animal was given various personality types. In The Carpenter and the Ape, the ape is a silly character who gets himself into trouble. In The Apes, the Glow-Worm, and the Popinjay, the apes are irrational characters who lash out at reason. Finally, in The Ape and the Boar, the ape is described as a “wise creature”. I like this diversity, whereas in Aesop’s fables, it is common to see the same animals have similar personalities.

“Bidpai.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidpai.

You can access these fables here: link