Have you heard of Jataka tales? Jataka tales are fairytale-like stories told by Shakyamuni Buddha to teach kindness, purity, honesty, generosity, worldly wisdom, and perseverance. The Buddha is often born as an animal and interacts with other animals, encountering supernatural beings. This makes the stories fun and lets your imagination go wild. One collection of Jataka tales, called The Jataka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, is three books containing 547 Jataka tales!

One tale (tale No. 272, Vyaggha – Jataka) is called, “Leave Well Enough Alone.” But in this retelling it might also be called “Thorough Thinking.”

“Thorough Thinking” begins with two Tree Sprites who live in a wood. One is a complainer who doesn’t think things through. She is annoyed because the lion and the tiger that come to their wood to hunt and eat are too messy. They leave the bones of their beastly meals scattered about the forest floor. You can imagine what an unsightly mess would pile up after many, many meals! She also thinks the lion and tiger are also too noisy - roaring and growling all the time.

She has an idea and tells the wise Tree Sprite, “I’m going to scare the lion and tiger away.” The wise Tree Sprite warns the grumpy Tree Sprite, “You’d better leave well enough alone.”

But one day the grumpy Tree Sprite gets fed up with the boney mess, and turns herself into an awful monster and scares the lion and tiger away. Can you make a scary noise?

The lion and tiger are so frightened that they never come back.

Soon the villagers begin cutting down the trees and clearing the land because they no longer fear the lion and the tiger who are gone from the wood forever. They begin to farm and build homes. What would you build on the cleared land?

Eventually, the forest home of the Tree Sprites is completely gone. The villagers have farms and homes, but where will the Tree Sprites go? Where will they live?

In a Jataka tale the Buddha himself is usually one of the characters. In “Leave Well Enough Alone,” who do you think the Buddha is?

More exploring: Jataka tales appear in the second basket, Sutta Pitaka, of the “three baskets,” Tipitaka. Another name for “three baskets” or Tipitaka is The Pali Canon which is a set of writings sacred to Theravada Buddhists. Find more Jataka tales at http://www.buddhanet.net/bt_conts.htm.