Parable 8: Monkeys in the Garden

The royal gardener wanted a vacation.

There were some monkeys living in the garden, so the gardener decided to put the monkeys in charge while he was gone.

“Make sure you water all the plants!” he told the monkeys.

“We should inspect the roots first," commanded the chief of the monkeys. "The deep roots need lots of water; the shallow roots not so much.”

So the monkeys inspected the roots carefully, pulling them up out of the ground to look at them.

The gardener came back from vacation to find all the plants were dead, uprooted by the foolish monkeys.

~ ~ ~

This is another one of the past-birth stories of the Buddha; this one is the Ārāmadūsaka-Jātaka. When someone tells the Buddha that a boy had pulled up the roots of the plants in a garden, the Buddha noted that this was not the first time he had done so; it had happened before in the boy's previous life as a monkey!

One of the lessons of this story is that even when intentions are good and your plan even appears to be "logical," there can still be bad results: it's all about skillfulness. We need to treat plants with skill, and we need to be able to treat ourselves with skill as well, not just acting impulsively or repeating bad habits, or any of the other foolish things we might be doing, like those foolish monkeys.

(illustration by W. Robinson)