The Bull with Magic Eyes and Other Chinese Fables

Abstract

This pamphlet distributed by City Lights Books in San Francisco is unpaginated, unillustrated except for the cover design, and originally sold for $.50. A postscript at the back gives a history of Chinese fables, beginning in the fourth and third centuries BC. The final page contains errata. There are sixty fables, two or three complete fables to a page, each with an attribution to author and era. One never needs to turn a page to finish a fable. None of these fables seem to be repeaters from the Western traditions that I know. Among my favorites are The Good Man and the Wooden Image, the final line of which is It is so easy to bully a good man! Another is How Not to Keep a Secret, which features a man who hides his treasure inside a wall with a sign saying that there is no treasure here. Relativity tells of a man who lost a sword overboard and so marked the place in the boat from which he dropped it! The Fate of the Clever presents a hunter who imitates animals' sounds in escalating fashion; to drive off the wolf, he imitates a tiger--only to attract a real tiger! In the end, a frustrated bear tears him apart. Finally, The Compassionate Man tells of a man who wants to have turtle soup but cannot bring himself to boil the turtle. He thus sets up a rod over a panful of boiling water and gives the turtle a chance at life by walking over the pan without falling in. When the turtle accomplishes the difficult feat, the man says Bravo! Do it again! Many parallel traditional Western fables. Thus The Tiger's First Donkey shows our Familiarity breeds contempt with creatures different from the fox and the lion. Then again, some fables set situations like ours but move in the opposite direction. So the lamb in The Lamb in a Tiger's Skin forgets his skin and runs away from a wolf whom he meets.