Episode 126: Kalilah and Dimnah

Classical Arabic Literature’s Most Beloved Beast Fables

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 126: Kalilah and Dimnah. In this program, we will read a short story collection called Kalilah and Dimnah, written by Persian author Ibn al-Muqaffa around 750 CE. Before we get started, a quick reminder that my new book on Homer’s Odyssey is coming out in eight days from this episode’s release – that’s June 23rd, 2026 – if you want to support the show and get a great character-by-character overview of ancient Greece’s most famous story, the book is again called The Odyssey: An Illustrated Guide, and there’s a coloring book version for the kids, too. I just got my author copies from Simon and Schuster, and they look great – there’s a link to the book in this episode’s show notes if you’d like to help out a very hopeful and nervous first-time author. Now, let’s learn all about Kalilah and Dimnah – I think you’ll love this one.

Kalilah and Dimnah is one of the core texts of early Arabic literature. A compilation of fables about animals, Kalilah and Dimnah features a variety of stories in which lions, crows, rats, gazelles, and other creatures interact in much the same ways that humans do. The tales told in Kalilah and Dimnah are often simple – simple enough to be read by kids enchanted by narratives of talking turtles and monkeys. However, Kalilah and Dimnah, for older readers, is a book full of parables about human society, and the human society that the stories depict is sophisticated, deceptive, and full of moral gray areas. A book that operates on multiple levels, then, Kalilah and Dimnah has something for everyone, and by the close of this show, you’ll know what the book contains, where it came from, and why its author, again a Persian writer named Ibn al-Muqaffa, put it into circulation around 750 CE.

Let’s put the book on our desk and take a look at it for a moment. Kalilah and Dimnah is a relatively slim volume of about 200 pages. As slender as the book is, though, it contains a lot of material – 67 stories in those 200 pages, and often, stories are nested within other stories. The book gets its title from a pair of jackals, Kalilah and Dimnah, who are the lead characters in two major stories. Our book for today is a collection of animal fables, as I said a moment ago. It’s also often described as something called a “mirror for princes.” The “mirror for princes” was a genre during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Books written within the “mirror for princes” genre were intended to teach rulers how to rule. The idea was that by reading many tales about rulers, some good, and some bad, and thus looking in a proverbial mirror as they read the “mirror of princes” text, a head of state could see examples of what to do, and what not to do, and thus, hopefully, become a better leader. The “mirror for princes” genre is an old one, and for those of us who live in democracies and other non-monarchical societies, the notion of a book designed to make autocrats better people seems a bit anachronistic. But, in 750 CE, when Ibn al-Muqaffa rendered the collection Kalilah and Dimnah into Arabic, monarchies were pretty much what was going on in central Eurasia, and mirrors for princes were an optimistic and genuine attempt to make kings better rulers, and better people.¹

Kalilah and Dimnah, put into circulation around 750 when the Umayyad empire combusted and the Abbasid empire was born, was not originally written in Arabic. The book was originally composed in Sanskrit, and a Persian translation of it came west into the Sasanian Persian empire back in the mid-500s. Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalilah and Dimnah, now the most famous version of the collection, was nonetheless an Arabic translation of a Persian translation of a Sanskrit original, and by the late Middle Ages, Kalilah and Dimnah, translated from Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Arabic version into various vernacular languages, had made its way all over the world. An Indian collection, then, with both Persian and Arabic overtones and a long afterlife later on, Kalilah and Dimnah is a collection of tales for the whole earth. Though the book is, again a “mirror for princes” text intended to edify and instruct a monarch, the book has learning and laughter for people of every social station, and there’s a reason why it’s been such a fixture in so many libraries much of the world over, even if the English-speaking world has too often given it short shrift.

This appealing, timeless book is a wonderful gateway into Arabic literary history and Abbasid culture more generally. Although we’ll get into the Islamic Golden Age proper in a future season, I still wanted to wrap up this present season on early Islamic literature with some of that golden age’s first sparkles. As we learned in the previous couple of shows, which focused on the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, and then the Zoroastrian creation narrative called the Bundahisn, the confluence of Arab and Persian culture from 650-850 produced a wellspring of artistic and intellectual work that we’re still benefiting from today. When Arab-Islamic armies captured Sasanian Persian towns and cities in the mid-600s, they found themselves the new overlords of a civilization so old and so diverse that it was not immediately comprehensible. As generations passed, real partnerships began to solidify between the Arab colonizers and the Persian colonized, and slowly, the learning of the old Persian world began to trickle together with that of the new Islamic empire. Ibn al-Muqaffa himself, schooled in the Zoroastrian Persian past as well as the Muslim Arab present, was one of countless industrious contributors who helped open the Islamic Golden Age. [music]

The Life of Ibn al-Muqaffa

Our author for today, again Ibn al-Muqaffa, lived and worked during dangerous times. Ibn al-Muqaffa was born about fifty miles south of what is today Shiraz, Iran, in about 720 CE. The son of wealthy Persian parents, and raised in the old Achaemenid heartland of Fars, Ibn al-Muqaffa might have lived a life of leisure and privilege if he’d been born during Sasanian times. But by 720, Iran was under Umayyad rule, and those who remembered pre-Islamic Persia were becoming vanishingly few. Ibn al-Muqaffa’s name means “son of the cripple.” His name at birth was Rozbih, and when he converted to Islam later in life – he was about 29 – he changed it to ‘Abdallah. However, Ibn al-Muqaffa’s father, a tax collector for the Umayyads, was implicated in an embezzlement scheme, and the older man’s hand was smashed as a result, and so today the writer is known to us as Ibn al-Muqaffa, again, “son of the cripple.” It’s not a very nice name, but that’s what he’s called.

Ibn al-Muqaffa, like a number of major authors from the early Islamic period, was an ethnic Persian who had an equal command of Arabic and the Middle Persian language. As scholar C.E. Bosworth writes, “Persians picked up the Arabic language, that Semitic tongue quite alien to the structure and feeling of their own Indo-European one, with astonishing rapidity and fluency, so that the direct participation of Persian converts (or mawali) to Arabic literature of the ‘Abbasid period was. . .of outstanding significance.”² In addition to being bilingual, Ibn al-Muqaffa also had a strong command of the great cultural history of the three Persian empires.³ The Prophet Muhammad is said to have remarked about Persians, “They will not give up poetry until camels give up yearning [for their resting places].”⁴ In other words, Persians, like Ibn al-Muqaffa, were from the earliest days of Islam onward, associated with a love for literature. Ibn al-Muqaffa’s education was robust and polyglot from a young age. One of this Arabic tutors was a Bedouin, and around the year 730, the general notion in the Umayyad empire was that the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula spoke the very best and most unpolluted Arabic. Eventually, with fluency in Persian and Arabic, Ibn al-Muqaffa began his career.

Like many ambitious young Persians in the newly minted Islamic world, Ibn al-Muqaffa sought work in civil service. His first Arab bosses were the Umayyad governors of his home province of Fars and another adjacent province. When Ibn al-Muqaffa was about 30, the Abbasid revolution caused a political earthquake in the empire. Many other Persian bureaucrats of the deposed Umayyad regime fared badly when the Abbasids took power. But when the dust settled, in about 749, Ibn al-Muqaffa was able to become a private secretary to the first Abbasid caliph’s uncle. For this post, Ibn al-Muqaffa ended up relocating to Basra, a dynamic, volatile imperial hub where a lot of pivotal history went down during the early Islamic period.

In addition to whatever services he provided for both his Umayyad and Abbasid employers, Ibn al-Muqaffa became a prolific translator and author, in particular rendering old Sasanian works on government, political history, and statecraft into excellent Arabic prose. Ibn al-Muqaffa, in later literary history, comes across as a punctilious, well-mannered person whose Arabic was astounding for a non-native speaker. And although a secretarial appointment with the first Abbasid caliph’s brother might seem to promise a long and fruitful career, poor Ibn al-Muqaffa ran into bad luck. This bad luck struck him when the second Abbasid caliph came to power.

When the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, ascended to the throne in 754, support for al-Mansur was not universal. In fact, one of his uncles, a powerful military man named Abdallah ibn Ali, who had helped defeat the Umayyads, made a bid for the throne. The coalition that supported al-Mansur defeated the insurrection of Abdallah ibn Ali, however, and Abdallah ibn Ali fled to Basra. There, the insurrectionist hoped to find support from his two brothers. One of these two brothers was the employer of our writer for today, Ibn al-Muqaffa. Seeking security in Basra, the failed insurrectionist Abdallah ibn Ali asked his brothers to get the new caliph al-Mansur to guarantee his safety. So Ibn al-Muqaffa’s employer told the Persian polyglot to draft a letter to the caliph al-Mansur – a letter that sought clemency for Abdallah ibn Ali. The letter that Ibn al-Muqaffa wrote, it seems, was a bit too strongly worded for the new caliph al-Mansur’s tastes. Among its provisions were that if al-Mansur dared to harm his rebellious uncle Abdallah ibn Ali, “Everything that [the caliph al-Mansur] owns in the way of slaves, clothes, goods, vessels, beasts of burden, and [his] landed property. . .will be [taken as] alms for the poor. . .Each slave or concubine that he owns. . .will be freed. . .Each of his wives will be divorced three times, irrevocably.”⁵ These are pretty harsh threats for the leader of a failed revolt to make against a powerful emperor. Another approach might have been to write, “Please, caliph al-Mansur, don’t hurt uncle Abdallah ibn Ali, seriously, please, show mercy, he’s your uncle and he made a big mistake, he just wants to lay low down here in Basra.”

However the strongly worded negotiation letter Ibn al-Muqaffa wrote actually came together, it was not well received. The new caliph al-Mansur was furious, and the immediate target of his wrath became not his insurgent uncle, but instead the writer Ibn al-Muqaffa himself. Al-Mansur ordered Ibn al-Muqaffa executed. Ibn al-Muqaffa, in spite of the objections of his Abbasid patrons, received a summons from the newly appointed governor of Basra. He went to the governor’s palace, and he never came out. Ibn al-Muqaffa was about 37 years old. He had been a prolific translator and author for many of them, working most often to help the Arabic-speaking intelligentsia better understand the vastness of the old Sasanian, and more broadly Persian world over which they now ruled.

The execution of Ibn al-Muqaffa was one of the pointed tragedies of the Abbasid caliphate’s bloody ascension. It is one of the tragic ironies of history that his most famous book is a collection of animal fables and mirror princes that, as we will see in a moment, time after time, cautions kings against hasty and violent actions, and urges them instead to be guarded and clement.

So, that’s a quick introduction to Ibn al-Muqaffa, the adaptable, bilingual, bicultural author of Kalilah and Dimnah who died at a lamentably young age. There are just two other things you need to know about this collection before we jump in, and both of them are pretty simple. First, Kalilah and Dimnah has three prefaces before the beast fables themselves begin. The first preface is about how the collection came to be translated from Sanskrit into Middle Persian very roughly back around 550, and the first preface may have been written at about that time. The second preface is by our author Ibn al-Muqaffa, done again around 750, and it’s a more straightforward introduction to the story collection, telling us how to read the stories and what they offer. Finally, the third preface, confusingly, jumps back in time to around 550, telling us about the life of the more ancient Persian guy who went over to India to get the collection and bring it to Persia in the first place. All of the prefaces are actually pretty delightful, it’s just that if you’re expecting to open up right away to beast fables, they can be confusing.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the translation I’m using. The translation – and there’s a link to it in the show notes – was done by Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery in 2021 by New York University Press. NYU Press, right now and over the past ten years, has been working its tail off to create a body of standard texts called the Library of Arabic Literature. I am going to use a lot of their books in upcoming shows, and to be very clear, because you may not know this, it’s actually pretty hard to find a lot of Classical Arabic literature in good English translations that have explanatory notes for those of us who don’t speak Arabic. The Library of Arabic Literature series started back in 2012 and has since produced a large number of fantastic translations of otherwise untranslated Arabic literature, and they’re doing a lot of good in the world making English translations of these kickass books that those of us who realistically aren’t going to learn Arabic can still read and enjoy. So, listeners, if we buy their books, they’ll be more inclined to create more translations, and English speakers can enjoy more Arabic literature, and that will be good for the world. Plus, the NYU Press Library of Arabic Literature series is a very classy looking series of books, all done in navy blue, and every literature nerd should have half a bookshelf full of some of the finest Arabic literature, right? Anyway, again, support NYU Press’ Library of Arabic Literature series – the link is at the top of the show notes – I have no affiliation with them – these are really good editions.

Alright, so let’s jump into this [ahem] NYU Press Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery translation of one of the foundational works of the Islamic Golden Age, Kalilah and Dimnah. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah: How Barzawayh Brought the Book from India to Persia

Kalilah and Dimnah begins by blessing God for all of God’s bountiful gifts to humanity, the richest of which is humanity’s intellect. In the book’s second sentence, Ibn al-Muqaffa writes that,

Acquired through experience, the intellect is a faculty hidden within a person, like fire latent in wood; the nature of fire is in the wood, but it only emerges by rubbing: it remains invisible until it is struck by something else, whereupon it ignites and burns. Similarly, the nature of the intellect is latent in a person: it is made manifest through education, and strengthened by experience. When it is strong, it is best at managing experiences and tempering behavior. It secures every benefit and repels every evil. Nothing, then, is better or more excellent for a person than the intellect, when it is supported by education and strengthened by experience. Someone who is endowed by his Creator with intellect and who bolsters himself by diligently pursuing education will enjoy good fortune and fulfill his hopes in the world; and in the next world he will attain the most excellent lot. (1.2)⁶

It’s quite a nice opening quote for Classical Arabic literature as a whole today, just as it surely was way back in 750 CE. And speaking of intellect, Ibn al-Muqaffa explains that the Sasanian king Khosrow I, who ruled from 531-579, was very brilliant indeed. Khosrow I, an intellectually curious monarch, wanted to know more, and at some point during his long reign, the great late Persian king had become aware of a certain book. This book had been written by philosophers from India, and according to what king Khosrow had heard, the book was a tremendous repository of wisdom of all sorts. The tome in question was a book that, in later Arabic literary history, would be called Kalilah and Dimnah. In addition to many other teachings, Kalilah and Dimnah offered kings instructions on how to be excellent rulers. Having learned about the book Kalilah and Dimnah, King Khosrow wanted to read it for himself.

Just to be very clear here, our author for today, Ibn al-Muqaffa, writing around 750 CE, is talking about a Pre-Islamic Sasanian king who lived two hundred years before he did. So, again, king Khosrow wanted the book, and he announced to the gigantic Sasanian empire that he would like to get a copy, and to have it translated into Persian. King Khosrow got lucky. In his kingdom, there lived a man named Barzawayh. Barzawayh, a physician and highly educated man, fluent in both Sanskrit and Persian, respectfully answered King Khosrow’s summons. The Sasanian king asked Barzawayh to pack his bags, and head over to India. Barzawayh could have whatever money he needed for the journey – all Barzawayh needed to do was to grab a copy of the Sanskrit original, translate it into Persian, and the entire Sasanian treasury would be at his disposal.

And so off Barzawayh went to the distant east, carrying with him the amusingly gigantic amount of 250,000 gold dinars in 25 saddlebags. The bilingual Barzawayh arrived in India and he got settled in. Barzawayh spent time with aristocrats and peasants alike, merely telling the Indians that he was a newcomer in search of learning. As he came to know India’s scholarly class better and better, Barzawayh kept the real reason he was there a secret. He told no one that he had ventured east in order to secure a copy of the book that would later be called Kalilah and Dimnah, and bring it back to Persia.

A smart, likeable person, Barzawayh naturally made friends. He came to trust one in particular, and eventually decided that he would reveal the purpose he was in India to this trusted acquaintance. Barzawayh began to reveal his secret to his new Indian buddy, but as it turned out, the Indian was on to him already. Barzawayh’s Indian friend said that he had figured out that the westerner had secrets. The Indian said he’d been watching Barzawayh carefully, and indeed that he admired the subtlety and cleverness of the western newcomer, even though Barzawayh was clearly hiding something.

Barzawayh, if he was taken aback by the other man’s perceptiveness, didn’t say anything. Instead, the two men talked about the nature of keeping secrets, the Indian revealing that his own king’s court was not a safe place. Still, after further discussion, the Indian got a hold of the Sanskrit books that Barzawayh had requested. Barzawayh toiled and toiled for a long time to get Kalilah and Dimnah translated into Persian, and when he had finally finished, he wrote to the Persian king Khosrow that his mission had completed his task, and had additional wonderful Sanskrit tomes of learning that the Persian monarch would also appreciate. The king wrote back, asking Barzawayh to hasten in returning to Persia, and before long, the translator was able to do just that.

King Khosrow was a little surprised when Barzawayh appeared in his court. The globetrotting translator looked a little worse for the wear. Yet after a rest, Barzawayh was restored to health, and once all of the books he’d brought were read aloud to the court, much to the delight of all the Persians who were present, Barzawayh was given lavish rewards. The author Ibn al-Muqaffa tells us that Barzawayh was invited to take anything he wanted from “storerooms of jewels, gold, silver, and garments” (1.18). If only all intellectuals and translators were so handsomely compensated! Barzawayh, classy and loyal to the king, told Khosrow that he’d only take a single fine robe from the Persian treasury, with the assumption that he’d wear it while serving the king of kings. But he did have one additional request. Barzawayh asked if perhaps a fellow court writer could compose a chapter about the translator Barzawayh, so that this chapter could be added to the pages of the book Kalilah and Dimnah.

Khosrow said of course he could do this, and straightaway, he summoned the court writer in question, and asked him to make Barzawayh’s chapter the very first chapter in Kalilah and Dimnah, and to depict the hardworking translator as favorably as possible. The court poet said he would absolutely do this, and the chapter was written, and everyone in the Sasanian court listened to it with great approval. Thereafter, Barzawayh and his fellow courtier served the Persian king of kings happily, and that, Ibn al-Muqaffa tells us, is how the story of Kalilah and Dimnah came from India to Persia. What follows next is Ibn al-Muqaffa’s own preface to the book. [music]

The Second Two Prefaces of Kalilah and Dimnah

Ibn al-Muqaffa describes Kalilah and Dimnah, as “a work of parables and stories composed by the people of India, who sought to incorporate into it the most eloquent speech they could find” (2.1). The young, our translator writes, could enjoy the tales as endearing fables, and the wise could appreciate the subtler implications of the tales told. The book cautions readers to slow down and savor each story’s, to not rush to the end, and to savor the process of education, for education, it says, is a fuel that feeds the fire of native intellect. Following this general counsel for reading the book, Kalilah and Dimnah’s second preface offers a dozen or so parables counseling the reader to use his intelligence, rather than letting it go to seed; to behave honestly and openly with friends, to pursue knowledge, wealth, and good behavior, but also to ultimately place stock in the afterlife. This chapter, Ibn al-Muqaffa writes at the end, is his own preface to the collection. Just as Barzawayh the Persian got his own preface, it seems Ibn al-Muqaffa thought that he deserved a second preface.

What follows next is a third preface. This third preface takes us back to Barzawayh, the man who translated Kalilah and Dimnah from Sanskrit to Persian, just as our author for today Ibn al-Muqaffa translated it from Persian to Arabic. So here is the life story of Barzawayh the physician, included in the book as a first-person account. Barzawayh studied medicine, he tells us, from the age of seven onward, and fairly early on, he decided that he would practice medicine for the sake of obtaining rewards in the afterlife. Because this was Barzawayh’s goal, he helped everyone he came across who needed helping, charging nothing. Charging nothing was hard sometimes, as his colleagues were becoming wealthy and prosperous. Yet Barzawayh reminded himself that mortal life was fleeting, and that the human body was a transient, happenstance thing. After steeling himself to relinquish hopes for earthly pleasures and social distinctions, oddly, Barzawayh found himself financially prosperous, after all.

Later in life, after he went to India on behalf of the Persian king, Barzawayh discovered that he was losing some of his confidence in medicine. Diseases cured, he tells us, just tended to come back. And it was due to his diminishing confidence in medicine that he became interested in religion. He learned that there were many religions, and that believers came to adhere to religious systems for different reasons. As he got older, Barzawayh discussed religion with many different devout people, but, as he writes,

I found that no one went beyond praising his own religion and disparaging the religion of those who disagreed with him. It became clear to me that their responses and arguments were arbitrary and tendentious. In none of them did I find any mark of impartiality and truth that could be recognized and accepted by a reasonable person. (3.9)

Barzawayh decided he couldn’t take any religion seriously. In a parable about a group of thieves duped by a homeowner whom they’re trying to burglarize, Barzawayh emphasizes that religion is just nonsense used to dupe people. He tried to adhere to his father’s religion, but he found this, too, unsatisfactory. Still, since religion was such a source of morality for humanity, Barzawayh fretted that he might be missing something, and accordingly, he acted by the most general moral precepts that everyone seemed to follow, avoiding things that were universally regarded as crimes. And Barzawayh continued to pursue knowledge, which, he says, once acquired, can never be taken away.

Increasingly, renunciation and asceticism attracted him. He became so attracted to a minimalist existence that he considered abandoning society for the company of brahmins and monks. In our podcast so far, from ancient Egypt to stoicism to Christian monasticism, we’ve heard many stalwart resolutions to renounce earthly pleasures and focus on the afterlife – this is one of human philosophy’s greatest hits. But this early chapter of Kalilah and Dimnah, whether or not you’re the type who wants to fast and contemplate until you die, still has some nice, pithy statements about the transience of mortality. Barzawayh states, “The world is like salt water: the more you drink, the thirstier you become. . .It is like a dream that brings the sleeper joy but vanishes as soon as he wakes. It is like lightning that flashes for a moment and disappears, leaving in darkness the person who hopes for rain” (3.18). Those are lovely similes, whatever your take on the subject is.

A moment later, though, Barzawayh reveals a rather unconditionally dour take on human existence, telling us that “the world is nothing but suffering, affliction, and torment” (3.21). From the moment of birth, he says, an infant experiences varying degrees of agony and degradation, a fitting introduction to the life of stress, tragedy, and infirmity that will come, with old age being an unending trial of various miseries. The worldview that Barzawayh eventually adopted was thus a bleak one, he says, and though he tried to be a good physician before and after he went to India, his ultimate goal was posthumous pleasure.

And thus ends the three prefaces of Kalilah and Dimnah; the first being a story of how it was translated from Sanskrit to Persian by the physician Barzawayh; the second, a grab bag of parables from Ibn al-Muqaffah; the third, the story of how the physician Barzawayh lost all hope in earthly existence and spent his days hoping for a happy afterlife. Now, here’s where the main portion of Kalilah and Dimnah actually begins. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The First Main Story – the Tale of the Lion and the Ox

The King of India, one day, asked a philosopher in his court to tell him a story. The king asked the philosopher to tell him a story of two dear friends, and a betrayer who came between them. The philosopher thought for a moment, and he began the first main story in Kalilah and Dimnah. This story, about 70 pages long, is called “The Lion and the Ox.” [sound effect] In the story, two oxen were pulling the cart of a merchant’s son. One of the oxen – his name was Shanzabah – became exhausted over the course of the journey. He sank down in the mud, and ultimately, he was left behind to fend for himself. Though he’d been abandoned by his human owners Shanzabah the ox ultimately did okay for himself. He found plenty to eat, and was so healthy and flourishing that from time to time, he would bellow with contentment.

Near where the ox Shanzabah had settled, a lion lived with a large group of other animals. The lion was a regal fellow, but a little dense, and even though he had plenty of crafty acquaintances around him in his leonine court, he didn’t make use of their intelligence very often. The great lion, when he heard the ox Shanzabah bellowing, was afraid, and although the lion wouldn’t tell anyone why, he refused to leave his den.

Within the lion’s groupies, there were a pair of jackals. Their names were Kalilah and Dimnah, and they will be the two main characters of the book Kalilah and Dimnah. Of the two of them, while both were sharp and quick-witted, Dimnah tended to be a bit more restless and unsatisfied, so in the remainder of this episode, we’ll remember that Dimnah was the more discontent of the of the two – Dimnah, discontent. Anyway, the two jackals Kalilah and Dimnah noticed that their lion king was just putzing around and staying in his den all the time, and they couldn’t figure out why.

The two jackals discussed what to do. On the one hand, it seemed like it wasn’t their place to question what was going on with the lion king. On the other hand, they both realized that they might help the lion, and also advance their own positions, if they offered to counsel their king. The jackals were hardheaded and sensible about being of service to their king. They both realized that some degree of flattery would be necessary, and that they would have to be humble and navigate their way forward carefully in the lion’s court.

Now, it was Dimnah, the more dissatisfied of the two jackals, who was really the driving force behind this plan, and Dimnah, when Kalilah asked him, said that his general agenda would be to act deferential, tactful, approve of the lion king’s good plans, and make him see the errors of his misconceived plans. Kalilah warned his fellow jackal that getting close to rulers was dangerous business – that in royal courts there were many pleasant things to be had, but also that precipitous falls could happen from careful social climbs. Undaunted, though, the restless Dimnah went to speak to the lion king.

Dimnah impressed the animal monarch with opening remarks about how even the lowly can be of service to the highborn, and then Dimnah offered a series of similes and parables to the kingly lion that were sufficiently impressive sounding that the lion sought ought a solitary audience with the jackal Dimnah. When the pair were alone, the subject of the ox’s bellowing came up. The lion admitted that he didn’t know what the sound was, and he said that if the terrifying noise were being emitted by a terrifying creature, the lion king and his court would have to relocate. Dimnah said he suspected that whatever was making the noise wasn’t so formidable, and with the lion king’s permission, the jackal Dimnah went to find out who was doing all of the bellowing.

The lion king, left alone after dispatching his new courtier, fretted. The king worried that he’d placed too much trust in the jackal, whom he barely knew. But in due time, Dimnah returned, and he said it was just an ordinary ox making all of the loud noises. Dimnah said he could bring the ox to the lion’s court, and the lion said that this was what he wanted. So off Dimnah went again, and he asked the ox to please come to the lion’s court. Only after a guarantee of safety would the wary ox agree, and when this guarantee was granted, the ox made the short journey to have an audience with the lion.

As it turned out, the lion not only welcomed the ox to his court. The two became very close friends and confidants. And the jackal Dimnah, who had himself wanted to ingratiate the lion king, became angry that his prospective position had been usurped. Dimnah hurried to the other jackal Kalilah and expressed his regret at how things had gone down at court. Kalilah hit his friend with a cluster of five very short stories, the moral of which was that it was Dimnah’s own fault that his position at court had been taken up by a bellowing ox.

The jackals discussed Dimnah’s unfortunate plight. Kalilah said that Dimnah had to be very careful with what Dimnah decided to do next. And Dimnah, in response, told a quick story. Now, there are many inset stories in Kalilah and Dimnah, and one that Dimnah tells Kalilah at this point is especially good. [sound effect] Dimnah said that there was once a crow who lived near a cobra. The cobra ate the poor crow’s young on several occasions. Heartbroken, and out of options, the crow resolved to ambush the cobra and peck out the cobra’s eyes. When the crow told his acquaintance of this plan, the acquaintance said it was a terrible idea. The crow, said the crow’s friend, would die. The crow’s friend offered him a better scheme, and the crow acted on it. The crow flew to a rooftop where a bathing woman had taken off her jewelry. The crow stole the jewelry, and perched nearby, so the woman and her household could see him. The humans began pursuing the crow, and he flew from perch to perch so that the humans followed and followed him, until he at last dropped the jewelry in the nest of the cobra. The humans, bent on recovering their jewelry, killed the cobra and recovered their property, and the crow thus vanquished his dangerous nemesis without endangering his own life. And finishing this short story, the restless jackal Dimnah told his friend Kalilah, “I’ve told you this tale to demonstrate that ingenuity can accomplish what force cannot” (4.45). And after another illustrative story told to prove that the weak can vanquish the strong through trickery and intelligence, Dimnah, appropriately, set out to jeopardize the position of the mighty ox, who had befriended the lion king. [music]

The Jackal Dimnah’s Scheming in the Lion’s Court, Continued

The ambitious jackal Dimnah went to work. He journeyed to the lion king’s court while the ox was away, and he began an audience with the monarch. Dimnah made a bold move. Dimnah told the lion king that the king’s dear friend, the ox Shanzabah, was double-crossing him, and indeed that Shanzabah wanted the lion kingdom’s domain all for himself. Dimnah said that the lion king needed to move quickly, and not hesitate and have his position further weakened. The lion, naturally, was flummoxed, saying that the ox had only been good to him. But Dimnah pressed further. The lion king had to act first, Dimnah said, and wise kings followed the advice of their ministers.

Still, the lion king resisted. He wasn’t afraid of his friend Shanzabah the ox. Shanzabah was an herbivore, and besides, he’d promised Shanzabah safety and security. The jackal Dimnah said that he understood this, but emphasized that the seemingly harmless Shanzabah likely had powerful and pernicious connections who actually could harm the lion king. And slowly, the force of Dimnah’s urgent, duplicitous rhetoric won over the lion king. The lion king said that he would send a message to the ox telling the ox to leave. But Dimnah said this wasn’t drastic enough, and that the lion should do away with the ox if the ox showed even the slightest sign of acting suspiciously.

Then, after receiving the king’s permission to go and visit the ox, Dimnah hurried to visit the ox Shanzabah, to sow the seeds of discord with him, as well. The jackal Dimnah wasted no time when he met with the ox. Dimnah, lying through his teeth, said that the lion king was planning on eating the ox. Hearing this awful news, the ox Shanzabah began thinking quickly. It seemed obvious to him that the lion king was receiving misinformation from some compelling source. But still, the ox wondered if he’d done anything wrong. The ox had given the lion frank advice from time to time, and wondered if this frank advice had been mistaken for insolence. The ox pondered how dangerous it was in general to be in the service of a king, and when he had finished voicing his fear and apprehension out loud, the manipulative jackal Dimnah said that the lion was set against the ox because of the lion king’s innate treachery.

Hearing this, the ox became bleak and fatalistic. He told a story in which carnivores ganged up on an herbivore who had previously been their friend, a situation analogous to his current one. He had no choice, the ox said. He would fight for his life. Yet after further conversation, the ox changed his strategy. The ox decided he would continue as he had been, although he’d be wary for any seemingly hostile behavior on the part of the lion.

Dimnah’s scheme was thus set in motion. The devious jackal went to see his friend Kalilah, and Dimnah announced, “Don’t imagine that the brotherhood between friends can hold. When a clever schemer uses his wiles to separate them, he can slice them apart just as a stone slices through water” (4.93).

And indeed, when the lion and the ox met, each noticed a guardedness and threatening wariness in the other’s posture, and they pounced upon each other, fighting fiercely until both were bloodied. The jackal Kalilah, seeing the mayhem that had broken out at court, castigated his friend Dimnah for Dimnah’s machinations. In fact, the jackal Kalilah, who has been a mostly inactive foil for the conniving Dimnah, reprimanded Dimnah in a long passage. King’s ministers, Kalilah fumed, should never counsel their leaders toward unnecessary war. Kalilah said that Dimnah had been the very worst sort of counselor – a courtier who had nothing to do, and thus turned his wiles to malevolence. Dimnah, Kalilah continued, was proof that a good ruler with terrible counselors was no longer a good ruler, after all. He said Dimnah was a disgraceful jackal who would never listen to advice, and in a pair of inset stories, Kalilah said that Dimnah’s addiction to clever schemes would be his undoing. In summation, Kalilah said, there was no way he could continue to be friends with Dimnah, since the scoundrel had betrayed his own king, who had been so kind to him. Kalilah growled, “if you can betray your king, who has shown you such favor, you’re sure to betray others. . .I have no illusions about changing your nature: I know that a bitter tree can be smeared with honey and butter but will still produce bitter fruit” (4.112).

And just as Kalilah finished his fearsome tirade against the perfidious Dimnah, the lion king finished killing the ox, and he wondered if the ox’s awful death had been unjust. Though the jackal Dimnah was able to momentarily convince the lion king that the killing of the ox was justified, later, the narrator tells us, the lion king found out that Dimnah had betrayed him, and the lion king put he evil counselor to death.

Thus ended the story of the Lion and the Ox, and if you’ll remember the King of India had asked to hear this story from his court philosopher, who has been narrating this story. The King of India, hearing of the sad fate of the great lion and ox, said it was a dispiriting tale about how a weak but clever creature – the jackal – managed to destroy the harmony of an otherwise happy court. As for kings, the King of India concluded, when they dealt with dubious counselors, “They should scrutinize their actions and accept their words only after proper investigation, and they should reject all people they know to be of this sort. Sound judgment and prudence lie in caution” (4.115). These are good words for any powerful ruler to remember, as was surely the intention of the story when Ibn al-Muqaffa translated it around 750 CE. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The Second Main Story – the Tale of the Fate of Dimnah the Jackal

The King of India, having heard the story of how the jackal Dimnah deceived the lion king and his goodly friend the ox, asked his court philosopher to tell him more. The philosopher had said that devious Dimnah had met a bad end. How had it happened? Hadn’t Dimnah tried to wriggle out of it? The philosopher then acquiesced to telling a more detailed version of the tale of how Dimnah fallen in fortune in the court of the lion. [sound effect]

The lion deeply regretted killing his friend the ox. And it wasn’t long before news reached the lion’s mother that of all the animals in the king’s court, one of the two jackals was to blame. A leopard in the kingdom heard the two jackals talking about the incitement of the murder, and the leopard told the lion king’s mother, for whatever reason swearing her to secrecy. The lion king’s mother, speaking with her son, discerned that he felt nothing but regret about killing the ox, and the more he thought about it, the worse the king felt.

The lion’s mother then made it clear that someone had told her who had engineered the strife between the lion and the ox. At the same time, the lion’s mother said, she just couldn’t spill the beans as to who was responsible – keeping secrets was a really important mark of character. The lion king said he understood, and the son and the mother decided on a compromise. She would try to give him an inkling without directly revealing the secret.

Soon, all of the lion’s principal companions were summoned, including Dimnah. Though the king’s mother had sworn secrecy, when she saw the jackal, she immediately accused him of being the architect of the awful plot that had turned the king on his friend. Dimnah, witty and devious as ever, spoke out quickly in his own defense. He said that he had only told the lion king what he’d known about the ox Shanzabah. Dimnah said he suspected that more of the king’s enemies were plotting against him. And so the lion king, who sincerely regretted his earlier haste, ordered a judge to conduct a meticulous investigation of the matter. Pretending to be altogether innocent, Dimnah announced that a thorough investigation would certainly free him from any blame. He said the ox, in the momentary unsettledness the ox had shown when confronted by the lion, had proved himself guilty, and Dimnah added that he had nothing to gain by sowing discord between the lion and the ox. Humble and sycophantic, the jackal Dimnah endeavored, as always, to play the role of a servile courtier.

The lion’s mother, as this courtroom sequence began to unfold, was disgusted, telling Dimnah that she was even more shocked that the jackal would stand there and give pious sounding, moralistic speeches in the court than that he had engineered an awful murder at court. The assembly adjourned for the day, and Dimnah was manacled and put in jail. The lion’s mother warned him not to listen to the slippery words of the jackal Dimnah. The lion king, said his mother, should just kill the jackal straightaway.

As for Dimnah, he found that he had a visitor in jail. It was his friend Kalilah, and seeing Kalilah, Dimnah thanked him for his steady and good advice, admitting that he (meaning Dimnah) was inclined to trouble and bad decisions. Kalilah recommended that Dimnah confess his crimes and at least do himself some good in the afterlife to come. And as the two jackals talked, in an adjacent cell, another mammal was listening, and he remembered everything he heard. Kalilah then fled the kingdom for his own safety, not wanting to be implicated in the mess.

The trial of Dimnah proceeded, with a judge overseeing it. The judge asked for testimonies from those who had any evidence for or against the defendant. The courtroom was quiet. And Dimnah himself spoke up. He said he was innocent. He told a story that cautioned them against jumping to conclusions without information. A person in the courtroom, however, thought differently. He said that Dimnah had certain physical signs of evil – his right eye was larger than his left, and his nose bent to the right, there were other signs too, and summarizing all of these, the man said of course everyone knew these were universal indications of wickedness. Dimnah was able to acquit himself of these silly accusations, and gain some momentum for his defense in doing so.

The lion king’s mother was furious. She told her son, “I don’t think you can distinguish what harms you and what benefits you” (5.34), and added that Dimnah was on track to prolong his own trial long enough to build public sympathy due to his magnetic personality. The next day, however, her worries proved unfounded. The case’s judge proclaimed that most people in the court thought that the jackal Dimnah was guilty. Dimnah, the judge said, ought to just fess up. Yet a moment later, Dimnah was at it again, indefatigable in his self-defense. He offered the courtroom an inset parable story about a falsely accused wife who was able to prove her innocence And again, the diabolical Dimnah defused the legal momentum that had been mounting against him.

The lion king’s mother was again angry. After a long hesitancy, she revealed how she had learned of Dimnah’s guilt, telling the lion king that the leopard in his entourage had told him about it. When summoned, the leopard confirmed the yes, he had indeed overheard a conversation that definitely implicated Dimnah. And then the prisoner who had overheard Kalilah and Dimnah talking when Dimnah had first been sent to jail offered corroborating testimony. The deceitful jackal’s fate was thus sealed, and Dimnah, in spite of his tireless and dauntless efforts as his own attorney, was put to death.

Let me pause for just a moment and say something about this second main narrative in Kalilah and Dimnah. There is some evidence that the story of Dimnah’s prosecution and eventual execution was added by Ibn al-Muqaffa himself. In the original Sanskrit collection, the wily jackal Dimnah gets the ox executed, and then ends up taking his rival’s position in the lion’s court. It is a Machiavellian story about a schemer rises to the top. Ibn al-Muqaffa may have added the subsequent chapter that we’ve just read to contribute some moral coherence to the book’s beginning. Without Dimnah’s punishment, after all, the lion king is a witless, duped monarch and courtiers are shown to be above the law. Ibn al-Muqaffa, in the newly-minted Abbasid regime, may have been indisposed to translating a story that depicted a king in such an unflattering light, even if it was just an old beast fable. With Dimnah’s punishment, the lion king’s court returns to relative moral order and the king gets justice against the conspiracy that was directed against him. Ibn al-Muqaffa, then, writing a “mirror for princes” text in the dangerous new Abbasid regime, was probably conscious that princes needed to look good in the mirrors that you offered them. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The Third Main Story – the Tale of the Ring Dove

The sad story of the lion and the ox and the conniving jackal who came between them was over. The King of India, having heard it from end to end, told his court philosopher that he was ready for another story – a different kind of story. The King of India said he’d like to hear a story not about how great friendships ended, but instead how they began, and how friends could flourish by listening to one another. The court philosopher, who took requests, began the next tale. [sound effect]

Once, there was a smart crow who lived in a tree. The crow, crafty and perceptive, saw a hunter approaching. The hunter laid a trap. He put grain all over the ground to entice birds to come and eat it, and he prepared a net to fling over whichever birds took the bait. And the crow watched as, in due time, a flock of doves descended and began eating the grain. The hunter, as the crow expected, sprung his trap, and the doves, now trapped in the net, panicked and flew chaotically in all directions. One of them, a ring dove, was smarter than its companions, and she called out that they should all fly in the same direction. The doves listened, and soon the net lifted off the ground under the force of the collaborating doves. Off they went, and the hunter followed the airborne net full of birds, and the smart crow, out of curiosity, hovered along behind them to see how the strange affair played out.

The ring dove who had engineered the escape had a destination in mind. She led the mob of trapped doves to the den of her friend. Her friend was a rat named Zirak and, the ring dove hoped, Zirak would be able to chew through enough of the net such that the doves could escape. When the net of doves reached Zirak’s nest, after a short conversation, the rat came out to help. The ring dove, who was the leader of her flock, asked the rat Zirak to free her companions first, and then her last of all. The rat – in between gnawing on the ropes as he’d been requested to – told the ring dove that this was why everyone loved the ring dove – she was selfless as well as smart. And it wasn’t long before the rat freed all of the doves, the ring dove last of all.

Now, the crafty crow, with which this story began, watched this unusual occurrence with great interest. The crow decided that he’d like to be friends with the rat, too. He flew down and greeted the rat and made as polite an overture as he could. The rat, said the crow, had helped all of his friends unhesitatingly. The crow said he’d sure like to have the rat as a friend.

The rat Zirak was skeptical. Crows ate rats, he said. The crow remonstrated. Why would he eat the rat when the rat’s friendship would be of vastly greater benefit to him? But the rat was unmoved by this reasoning. They were, the rat said, foes by nature. The rat proclaimed, “Truces between innate enemies eventually revert to hostility. No truce with an innate enemy can be trusted or depended on. Heat water as long as you wish; it will still put out fire” (6.9). This was a sound argument, but the crow still disagreed. Intelligent creatures, the crow said, could surmount innate differences. He said that friendships between good, smart people were like cups of gold – easily made from willing and workable material, and easily mended in the event of any problems, too. The crow said he’d resolved to be the rat’s friend and brother no matter what.

The rat, finally won over, said he’d be the crow’s friend. The rat explained that he’d voiced his initial reluctance because he didn’t want to look like a fool through and through if the crow betrayed him. He came out of his den. The crow promised that if any of his rodent-devouring compatriots passed by, he’d protect the rat from these fellow carnivores, and the crow and rat thus sealed their bond of friendship.

The rat and the crow got to know one another over the course of a few days, and before long the crow said that he found the field in which the rat lived to be pretty dangerous. A lot of people passed by on the adjacent paths, he said. The crow said he had a friend who was a turtle, and living where she lived would be safer than the open field where the rat had made his den. The rat said living in a more secluded place with a turtle sounded fine to him, and so the crow picked the rat up by the tail and flew to where the turtle lived. Once they had arrived there, and the turtle recovered from her initial startlement, the turtle asked the rat to tell her a bit about himself.

The rat began a complex story that contained inset stories. The main narrative thread was that the rat had once had a great nest, and he’d slept on a thousand gold dinars. As a speaker in the rat’s story puts it, “Money increases strength and intelligence” (6.20), and in spite of the objective silliness of this adage, it seems to be true within the context of the rat’s story. Because when his nest was dug up, and his dinars taken, the rat indeed found that he was less esteemed, and that he couldn’t jump as high as he had once been able to. He deduced from the experience that money was everything, that people who had no money had no intelligence, and that death was more tolerable than poverty.

The rat schemed to get his dinars back. But on each occasion that he tried to recover the money from those who had dug it up, they caught him, struck him with a stick, and sent him dashing back to safety. This difficult experience changed the rat’s opinion of the value of money. The rat slowly realized that money was not wealth, but instead that serenity, however it came about, was true prosperity. And once the rat had these realizations, he’d left his home in a residential house, and moved out to the country. Now, the rat said, he was a more minimalistic rat, appreciating the basic necessities of life, together with friendship. [music]

This was the rat’s story as he told it to the turtle after they were introduced to one another by their mutual friend, the crow. The turtle, having heard the saga of this rodent Siddartha, observed that the rat was still somewhat melancholy. The turtle added that just as the rat’s story had illustrated, money and good fortune came and went, and the turtle said that the rat could count on her friendship, and the friendship of the crow, through whatever upcoming tempests life hurled their way.

As for the crow, he was delighted at the rapprochement between the rat and the turtle, and made some summary remarks. But just as the crow was speaking, a gazelle galloped up to where the three small creatures were talking, startling all of them. The crow, rat, and turtle all hid. A moment later, though, as the crow saw that the gazelle had only come to drink, the crow asked the gazelle what had brought him there.

The gazelle, realizing he was safe for the moment, answered the crow by saying he’d fled hunters – that was what brought him to the little watering hole where the turtle lived. The crow offered his friendship, and the gazelle accepted it, and soon, the crow, the rat, the turtle, and the gazelle had become a tight quartet of friends.

Time passed, and one day, the gazelle turned up missing. When the crow flew up to see if he could locate the gazelle, the crow saw that the gazelle had become caught in a snare. The gazelle’s friends sprang into action. The rat began gnawing through the bonds. Even the turtle came out to help, but the turtle’s presence concerned the gazelle. The turtle, the gazelle said as he was being freed, couldn’t flee if the hunter arrived to check his snares! The rat and crow could get away, but as for the turtle, she’d be too slow! Hearing this, the turtle shook her head, and said, “A life of separation from one’s friends is no life at all” (6.33). As brave and adorable as this sentiment was, unfortunately, just what the gazelle feared came to happen. The hunter arrived, the three swift creatures got away, and the hunter tied up the turtle.

The other three creatures regrouped, stricken at their friend’s abduction. They came up with a plan. The gazelle would lie within eyeshot of the hunter and pretend to be injured, and to help with the illusion, the crow would pretend to be eating the gazelle. This would distract the hunter. While the hunter was distracted, the rat said, he would dart in and free the captive turtle. Then, once the hunter got close to the gazelle, the gazelle would limp off, luring the hunter ever further away from the turtle.

And this was exactly what the animals did. After the hunter chased the gazelle some distance away, he returned to his camp and found that the turtle had escaped. The hunter could only conclude, “This. . .must be a land of jinn or enchanters!” (6.36), and he ran for his life. As for the crow, the rat, the turtle, and the gazelle, the quartet returned to the security of their little grove, where they were safe. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The Fourth Main Story – the Tale of the Crows and the Owls

The King of India finished listening to the philosopher’s appealing story about the four animal friends and the bonds that had developed between them. And then the King of India issued a new request. He made an – oddly specific – request for a rather different sort of narrative. The King of India said, “tell me one about somebody misled by an enemy who assumed a façade of humility and flattery with the intention to deceive” (7.1). The philosopher thought for a moment, and he said that this request called to mind the story of how the owls met a bad end due to the machinations of the crows. And then, the philosopher began the book’s fourth main story. [sound effect]

There was once, the philosopher said, a mountain. On this mountain there were two great trees. One of these trees was home to a thousand crows, together with their king. The other giant tree was the home of a thousand owls, together with their king. The two kingdoms were at war, and one night, the owls attacked the crows, murdering many. The next morning, the crows discussed how to respond. Five crows in particular were noted for their high intelligence. These five crows, when requested, offered the crow king their counsel.

The first crow said the crows ought to just flee. The second crow proclaimed that the crows should fight as best they could. The third crow believed that intelligence gathering was essential – perhaps the owls would agree to an armistice. The fourth did not want to negotiate – he agreed with the first, and said the crows should migrate. Then, the fifth of the five wise crows was consulted as to how to best respond to the owls’ recent attack.

The fifth crow spoke at length. Indeed, the fifth crow said, they couldn’t match the owls’ strength. He said they shouldn’t surrender or seek to pay a ransom for peace. He complimented the crow king for seeking the counsel of his advisors, saying that wise kings sought to become wiser through the input of others. Ultimately, the fifth crow advisor said that some of his guidance to the crow king would be given in secret, as negotiations between monarchs and counselors were best not aired in a public court.

Thus, the crow king met privately with the fifth of the wise crows for an extended conversation. The crow king and his wise counselor discussed the origins of the rift between the crows and owls, and then the fifth crow counselor revealed his plan. The crow king, said the fifth crow counselor, would beat him severely. And then, bloodied and missing feathers, the counselor would pretend to defect to the owls, and in doing so, infiltrate their highest court. The crow king said he understood, and the plan was put into motion.

That night, the wise crow counselor, having received his beating, lay battered at the foot of the crows’ great tree. When owl scouts saw him there, they hurried to recover him, and then brought him to the court of the owls. There, the owl king questioned the wily crow counselor. The crow counselor, as he had planned, fed the owl king and his court false information. The crow counselor lied. He said that he’d told his fellow crows that peace and submission were the best options, and that that was why they’d battered him and cast him out.

For a time, then, the owl court discussed what to do with the outcast crow counselor. Their opinions were various, but one owl counselor, in particular, had strong suspicions that the supposed pariah of the crows was not what he seemed. This suspicious owl said, “Don’t believe what [this battered] crow says. Remember that an enemy who can inflict no harm from a distance, often, if he is a smooth talker, tries to do it by drawing near and giving advice” (7.33). And although the owl king heard this clear warning against trusting one of the enemy crows, the owl king took in the exiled crow counselor, and treated the newcomer as one of his courtiers.

The pariah crow, alone now in the court of the owls, began his schemes. He grew more and more prosperous in the court of the owls, in spite of the objections of a naysaying owl counselor. And when the crow had gathered a sufficient amount of intel, he flew back to the tree where all of the crows lived. The deceptive crow’s plan was ruthless and simple. Every day, he said, the owls gathered in a cave, as they were nocturnal. The crows would put dry wood around the entrance, and then ignite it, fanning the flames with their wings. Owls who tried to leave would be burned alive. Those who remained inside would choke on the fumes from the blaze. The crows agreed to this plan, and it was speedily carried out. And the owls, in this fashion, were destroyed.

The crows were fascinated by the counselor who had been their voluntary outcast and who had led them to victory. The double agent crow was asked about his time with the owls, and he said that one had to go to great lengths to defend one’s people. He said that humbling oneself before enemies was often the only way to survive. The crow king observed that devious statecraft could destroy an enemy regime far more thoroughly than open war. He asked about what his defeated counterpart had been like. The clever crow counselor said that the owl king had been haughty and inept. The only wise owl, said the crow counselor, had been the one who had recommended his execution. But the owl king had not listened, and this had been his downfall. And that was the story of the crows and the owls, the fourth main installment in Kalilah and Dimnah. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The Fifth Main Story – the Tale of the Turtle and the Monkey

The King of India said that he’d heard a number of stories so far, and that what he wanted to hear next was the story of someone who worked and worked in order to get something, but once that something had been acquired, did not know keep it. The court philosopher considered it, and then began the story of the Turtle and the Monkey. [sound effect]

There was once a monkey king who ruled over many monkeys. He got old. And in his old age, he was deposed by a relative, thus losing the powerful position he had held all of his life. The old monkey king went to live in a seaside grove, and spent his days munching on figs and staring out over the ocean. As time passed, the deposed monkey king became friends with a turtle who lived in the same grove. The turtle and the monkey spent so much time together that the turtle began ignoring his wife and household, and the turtle’s wife decided she needed to do away with the primate to whom her husband had become so devoted.

The turtle’s wife and her friend came up with a scheme, and put it into action. The turtle’s wife pretended to be very, very sick. And her friend told the turtle that the only cure for the sickness was for the turtle’s wife to eat some of the monkey’s heart. The turtle, understanding his dilemma, agonized over what to do. But in the end, the turtle chose to help his wife. His plan was to lure the monkey to the island where he lived, where the old monkey king would starve to death.

Soon, distraught and conflicted, the turtle proceeded with his plan. He carried his friend the monkey on his shell, swimming out to the island where he lived with his family, and hesitating along the way several time as conflict tore through him. Eventually, though, the turtle couldn’t take it any more. He revealed what was going on. His wife was dying. She needed to eat a monkey’s heart to be well again.

The monkey said he understood. He said that sometimes when monkey women became sick, monkey men would give up their hearts in order to get them well again. He said that he would help his friend. It was just that he’d left his heart back on the shore. The monkey said that when he visited places where there was to be great happiness, like the home of the turtle, he sometimes left his weary and careworn heart behind, so as to let the happiness be undiluted. The turtle, believing his friend’s story, said he’d take the monkey back to the shore, and he did so.

When the pair got there, the monkey hurried back up into the canopy, where the turtle couldn’t follow. The monkey said the turtle had cruelly tricked him, and that he wouldn’t be fooled again. And the turtle, knowing he was in the wrong, admitted as much. He said his actions were indefensible, and that he was devastated down to his very soul since he had betrayed his dear friend. [music]

The Stories within the Stories of Kalilah and Dimnah

So that takes us about two thirds through Kalilah and Dimnah. We’ve heard five long stories – the story of the ox and the lion, the story of what happened to the evil counselor Dimnah, the happier story of how the crow, rat, turtle, and gazelle all became friends, the story of how the crows outsmarted the owls, and just now, the tale of the turtle and the monkey. The five stories we’ve gone through so far have been fairly long – the tale of the ox and lion was over forty pages in the NYU Fishbein and Montgomery translation. And within these five long stories, there have been numerous short inset ones. We are actually through 55 out of the book’s 65 stories. I’ve mentioned some of the stories within stories, but I just wanted to pause for a moment and make clear that for comprehensibility’s sake, I have not tried to tell you 55 stories over the past hour. Kalilah and Dimnah is a collection of narrative Russian dolls, and some of the stories within stories within stories are brief enough to be skipped over in an introductory presentation like this one. Both the major and minor narratives in the book, as I mentioned earlier, generally aim at offering wisdom to a head of state, inculcating the importance of intelligence, caution, guardedness, and prudence, while also emphasizing the value of genuine friendship and listening to the advice of sincere and genuine friends and ministers. There have been numerous tangled thickets of beast fable stories that essentially hammer home these same themes, and we don’t have time for all of them.

After the end of the story of the monkey and the turtle that we’ve just wrapped up, our book for today has a structural transition. The first 55 stories have basically been long stories studded with very short stories. What’s next in the book are a series of medium stories, most of which have no inset narratives – our edition for today breaks them into nine remaining stories, a couple of which have short inset tales. It seems a bit abusive for me to drag you through the stops and starts of a dozen more stories, so what I’d like to do is to tell you just one more of them in full, but then, as we come to the close of the book, start to zoom out a bit and discuss the themes that pervade the end of the book.

Although most of the rest of Kalilah and Dimnah is made up of shorter narratives, there’s one final long tale – the longest, actually, in the whole collection. This final long story is told when the King of India requests a story about “which quality a king must use in order to enjoy the respect of his officials and subjects, bolster his reign, and protect his land” (13.1). As Kalilah and Dimnah is largely a book about how leaders ought to lead, it’s only appropriate that its final sustained narrative is overtly on the subject of what makes a great king great. So here’s the last long story in Kalilah and Dimnah, entitled “King Haylar and His Minister Baylar.” [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah – The Sixth Main Story – King Haylar and His Minister Baylar

Once, there was a king in India named Haylar – not to be confused with the King of India who is a main character in the narrative frame of the collection Kalilah and Dimnah. This Indian King, Haylar, had, in the past, made a big mistake. King Haylar had killed 12,000 brahmins in his kingdom. When he asked some brahmins for help in interpreting his dreams, the brahmins, remembering the king’s prior cruelty to their sect, began plotting against King Haylar. They asked the king to hand over those dearest to him, including his wife, Irakht, other close relatives, and the king’s minister, Baylar, in addition to his elephants and other animals. The brahmins said they would kill everyone he loved, bathe him in their blood, and only then would he keep his kingdom.

The king, when he heard their advice, initially rejected it outright. But the brahmins worked their wiles on the king, telling him his life and the stability of the kingdom must trump any of his personal sentimentality, and soon, King Haylar, although tormented, found himself entertaining their dire proposal. And soon, those close to the king observed that he was not well.

King Haylar’s minister, whose name was again Baylar, noticed the king’s unease most keenly. And after minister Baylar urged the queen to do so, Queen Irakht went to speak with the king. After some hesitation, the king revealed what the brahmins had said was required of him. He told the queen that his brahmins had commanded him to kill her and everyone else closest to him and bathe in their blood. The queen, keeping her composure, said that if this was what he had to do, then he had to do it. At the same time, the queen told the king that – uh – the king had killed twelve thousand brahmins, and that just maybe they had conceived of this horrific sounding necessity in order to dupe and punish him? She suggested that he consult with another dream interpreter – a dream interpreter who didn’t hate him.

The king did just this, visiting an old acquaintance who interpreted dreams. The old acquaintance interpreted the dreams that the king had had, telling King Haylar that the dreams foretold of things to come. It wasn’t long before the king’s dream interpreter’s predictions started coming true. King Haylar expressed gratitude to both his wife and his dream interpreter. When a shipment of treasures came to his kingdom, King Haylar divided them between those who had helped him. However, a new problem arose. King Haylar became enraged at his wife Irakht, and he ordered his minister Baylar to kill Queen Irakht.

Minister Baylar was experienced in dealing with the king, and though he escorted Queen Irakht away and pretended to have executed her, he left her alive, because he suspected the king would regret his rash decision. Minister Baylar was entirely correct. He went back to King Haylar, and the king and the minister had a very long conversation, during which Minister Baylar spewed aphorisms. As King Haylar sunk deeper and deeper into despair over having Queen Irakht executed, he alternately mourned her loss, chastised himself for ordering her death, and lashed out at Minister Baylar, but, in an 11-page swathe of Kalilah and Dimnah that is, in my opinion, objectively pretty tiresome, Minister Baylar replied to each of the king’s increasingly anguished outbursts with punchy, wise-sounding, and largely irrelevant remarks. Finally, Minister Baylar seemed to realize that his verbal diarrhea was not making his monarch feel any better. Minister Baylar then revealed that Queen Irakht was indeed still alive. King Haylar said that he was overjoyed, and also that he realized he had put Minister Baylar in an awful position by compelling him to kill the queen.

When the not-actually-dead queen appeared, King Haylar was overjoyed, and he told Minister Baylar that the minister could have control of the entire kingdom. But Minister Baylar objected, saying that all he wanted was to serve. Echoing a theme common throughout the collection Kalilah and Dimnah, Minister Baylar said, “All I ask today is that you not act hastily in any matter of such importance – the consequences of which you might regret and which might bring grief and sorrow in their wake” (13.80). Monarchs, throughout Ibn al-Muqaffa’s collection, as we have seen, are often cautioned from impetuosity in just this fashion. And following this vow, in a thematically bumpy ending to the story of King Haylar and Minister Baylar, the king had all of the brahmins who had advised him to kill his family executed. [music]

Summing Up the Remainder of Kalilah and Dimnah

So that takes us through the six longest stories of Kalilah and Dimnah, but as I said a moment ago, there are numerous other medium-length tales that close the book. If I went through each of them, you would be lost in a slush of lions and rats and birds and wise sounding sayings, so what I’m going to do now is summarize the remainder of the book very quickly.

Kalilah and Dimnah has several recurring themes, and being a “mirror for princes,” again, a manual for monarchical self-conduct, the collection more than anything else emphasizes that navigating human society takes intelligence, guardedness, and patience. Kalilah and Dimnah depicts civilized society as full of pitfalls and trickery, but also full of wondrous opportunities for friendship and collaboration, and a majority of the tales, in some way or another, offer lessons on how to tell friends from enemies, and how to stay cool under the duress of challenging circumstances.

While Kalilah and Dimnah includes many stories of unlikely friendships, such as ones we’ve heard already, the collection also emphasizes the limits of alliances between natural enemies, or between those who have been at odds with one another. For instance, in one later story, a rat saves a cat from a trap after they’ve vowed allegiance to each other, and although they had no love lost for one another before, they are each better off for their unlikely partnership. Rather than a schmaltzy ending involving interspecial bonds, the rat and cat keep their distance from one another at the story’s close, unable to overcome their congenital enmity even if they were useful to one another. Similarly, when a king forgives his pet bird for a crime committed against the king’s family, even though the forgiveness is sincere, the bird cannot accept it and rejoin the king’s household. The moral of these stories is as melancholy as it is clear. Sometimes bygones can’t be bygones. Sometimes, although foes can become allies for a time, due to the nature of what they are, they can never quite be friends.

Kalilah and Dimnah’s moral lessons are often complex. In one of the book’s final tales, a pious and ascetic jackal is reluctant to serve as a king’s minister, as the jackal knows the position will require deception. Only after the king agrees to not act hastily in any of his dealings with the jackal does the jackal reluctantly concede to joining the court. When the jackal does, though, a plot against him threatens his position and his life, and indeed the king acts hastily and orders the jackal imprisoned. Only after very touchy renegotiations does the jackal enter the king’s service again, and we don’t get the sense that they’re going to be best friends, either. The story seems to be a lesson for ministers and diplomats as much as kings. Politics, in this later story as well as others in Kalilah and Dimnah, are full of trap doors and intricate plots. Kings are marvelous in their largesse and dreadful in their rash cruelty, and court is never, ever safe.

As ambivalent as Kalilah and Dimnah is about kings, though, the collection comes to an end with a few tales that inculcate the right of kings to rule. For instance, in one, a young prince and his four friends, all of whom have different backgrounds, showcase their talents, but the prince then becomes king, saying that his talent is being blessed by destiny, which is greater than any talent. A houseguest, impressed by his host speaking Hebrew, decides he wants to learn Hebrew, but before he can get started, he’s warned that trying to change course entirely in one’s life often means relinquishing what one is already good at, the moral of the story essentially being to stay in your station in life without striving upward. The highborn, in these later stories, are highborn because of destiny, and trying to ascend from one’s station is a foolish mistake.

The book Kalilah and Dimnah, after these final stories on the trickiness of navigating society at any level, concludes by zooming out to the frame narrative a final time. The King of India, who had heard the stories in the book, finally had no more requests. The philosopher who had told all of the stories praised his monarch, telling the king, “Your discretion and knowledge are complete, your intelligence and memory keen, and your courage and generosity perfect. . .There is no deficiency in your judgment” (17.8). The philosopher who told all of the book’s stories also announced that “Whoever ponders this book with his intelligence, and acts on it according to his right judgment, and reflects on it with his sound judgment deserves an exalted position and, with the help of Providence, will be fit to deal with weighty matters when the time comes” (17.9). And then, grateful for all of the wisdom that had been imparted to him, the King of India offered his court philosopher as much of the wealth in the state treasury as the philosopher wanted, and raised the storyteller to a rank higher than any other courtier. And that’s the end. [music]

From the Panchatantra to Kalilah and Dimnah

So that’s a long summary of the majority of Kalilah and Dimnah, one of the most celebrated texts in early Arabic literature, and one whose sophistication we can still appreciate today. Earlier in this episode, we learned a bit about the Persian author Ibn al-Muqaffa, who learned Arabic and worked in governmental posts under Umayyad and Abbasid administrations. Now that we’ve heard a synopsis of Kalilah and Dimnah, let’s learn a bit more about where this collection came from, what became of it after Ibn al-Muqaffa’s translation around 750, and then consider what attracted him to creating an Arabic version of the book.

Let’s start at the beginning, with what we know about the earliest origins of Kalilah and Dimnah. Kalilah and Dimnah’s roots were in India – the jackals’ names are Karataka and Damanaka in the original text. First composed in Sanskrit, the collection was once called Five Discourses, or the Panchatantra. The original Sanskrit collection came together between the 100s BCE and the 200s CE, and the Panchatantra itself was an ensemble production, some of its stories likely coming from much more ancient folklore. The Arabic version of Kalilah and Dimnah, which we just read, tells the story of how the book Kalilah and Dimnah came from India to Sasanian Persia. According to our book for today, just to review, the Sasanian king Khosrow I, who ruled from 531-579 CE, had heard about the Panchatantra, and he sent an envoy named Barzawayh to India to retrieve the text and translate it into Middle Persian. This means that about 200 years before Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalilah and Dimnah, a version of the collection was circulating in the Persian-speaking world. The Persian translation seems to have been popular, because Kalilah and Dimnah was translated into Syriac, perhaps by a Christian population within the Sasanian empire, though the Syriac translation was lost.

When Ibn al-Muqaffa translated Kalilah and Dimnah from Middle Persian to Arabic around 750, then, the collection was already almost a thousand years old in one form or another. Over the next thousand years, due to the somewhat amorphous nature of the collection, authorial invention, and human error, Kalilah and Dimnah evolved into many different translations from Arabic – New Persian in the tenth century, Greek in the eleventh century, Hebrew in the twelfth, Spanish in the thirteenth, and more after that. From these earlier translations, later translations sprang – an Ottoman Turkish translation from the New Persian translation, and a German translation of the Latin translation, which had come from the Hebrew translation, which had come from the Arabic translation, which had come from the Middle Persian translation, which had come from the original Sanskrit. The point here is that although the stories of Kalilah and Dimnah are pretty similar from translation to translation and century to century, the collection evolved depending on where it migrated over the course of its extremely long and intercontinental history.

There is a lot that we don’t know about Kalilah and Dimnah, but, because scholars have the text of the Panchatantra, we can make some basic observations about how Ibn al-Muqaffa’s collection differs from the earlier Sanskrit one. Specifically, at some point during the process of the Indian Panchatantra becoming the Arabic Kalilah and Dimnah, eight additional chapters were added. Three were from Book 12 of the Mahabharata, in which a sage is instructing a king using animal fables. For the other five stories in Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Arabic version, either Ibn al-Muqaffa or an earlier Middle Persian author harvested them from older Indian materials in circulation within the Persian empire to make the text that we read today a bit longer. There are also, as we would expect, some Islamic elements in the Arabic version of the collection that are not present in the older Sanskrit version.

The Arabic version of Kalilah and Dimnah contains what we might call multiple theological layers. The Indian Panchatantra is more of a secular than a religious text, teaching hardheaded morality through a bundle of tales in which saints and scoundrels are shown in all of their various hues. In Literature and History, we watched as the amoral warlords like Odysseus and King David, between 700 BCE and 100 CE, gave way to gentler, more wholesome protagonists like Jesus and the heroines of ancient Greek novels. The Panchatantra emerged from this slow transition, and so some of its stories applaud Machiavellian ruthlessness, and others favor the virtues of honesty and loyalty to friends. When Ibn al-Muqaffa translated the collection into Kalilah and Dimnah, he added subtle Islamic touches. Kalilah and Dimnah doesn’t quote the Qur’an, nor any early hadiths, nor have intrusive disquisitions about Islamic ideas. But in occasional commonplace expressions like in sha’ Allah, or “god willing” and with similarly scattered references to Islamic philosophy, Ibn al-Muqaffa nudged the stories here and there to make them resonate with the Abbasid period.

The older Indian Panchatantra is sometimes Darwinian in its sensibilities, depicting intelligence and ruthlessness as primary tools for the acquisition of power. By the life of Ibn al-Muqaffa, however, central Eurasia was as invested in the notion of divine providence as it was the fearsome exercise of human free will. In two places pointed out by the editors of the NYU Press edition, Ibn al-Muqaffa emphasizes that both are important – both individual agency, as well as faith in providence. For instance, a monkey, caught in a tough moral bind, exclaims at one point, “The only thing to be done is to seek help from God and to use my own cunning” (8.11). In a different story, a beleaguered rat proclaims, “I am surrounded by troubles. . .I see no recourse for me but to rely on God, and to use my intelligence and ingenuity” (10.3).⁷ These quotes wonderfully illustrate how the version of Kalilah and Dimnah that we read today essentially has it both ways, being Islamic in sensibility, but also retaining the old, shrewd, survivalist morality of ancient Indian beast fables. As to whether we should resign ourselves to divine will, or strive to challenge and distinguish ourselves, Kalilah and Dimnah sometimes emphasizes one; sometimes the other; and sometimes both at once. In this way, the collection is a perfect illustration of the long historic timeframe that produced it.

So that’s a quick synopsis of the prehistory of Kalilah and Dimnah. Most of the collection came from Sanskrit stories from very roughly 150 BCE – 250 CE, made its way to Persia around 550 CE, and was translated into Arabic in 750 CE. Since Arabic was the lingua franca of much of the earth after 750 CE, Kalilah and Dimnah had many, many later variations and translations in subsequent history. As we head through the Middle Ages in later episodes, Kalilah and Dimnah will come up a number of times. For now, though, I want to talk a bit about Kalilah and Dimnah’s immediate historical context, and what it might have meant in the 750s CE to the adaptable, polyglot Persian intellectual who translated it. [music]

Kalilah and Dimnah: A More Mature Work of Wisdom Literature

Kalilah and Dimnah, with all of its prehistory and later variations, can be understood as a piece of wisdom literature. From the “Instructions of Shuruppak” in 2500 BCE, to the Bronze Age “Instructions of Amenemope,” to Hesiod’s Works and Days, to the Book of Ecclesiastes, the epistles of Horace, the New Testament Gospels, and Marcus Aurelius’ Mediations, we’ve read oodles of books in our podcast that fall more or less under the mantle of “wisdom literature,” essentially lightweight philosophy mainly focusing on ethics and offering various maxims on how to best get through life. Wisdom literature always was, and still is, one of the most popular genres out there in the world. Search Amazon’s top ten sellers in any given week, and indefatigably, some of them will be modern-day wisdom literature on topics like changing your life for the better, or building good habits, or navigating work and society while keeping your home life enriching, and that kind of thing. Wisdom literature has been a go-to genre of reading and writing since the Late Bronze Age. At the same time, because of the short, digestible lessons that it purveys, and, moreover, its repetitiousness from century to century, wisdom literature can be pretty trite and predictable, as well.

The genre, over 3,000 extant years, tends to offer a lot of the same lessons. As someone who has read about 3,000 years of it, I can offer you all of wisdom literature in roughly thirty seconds. Here it is. Don’t be hasty. Fortune casts us down just as quickly as it brings us up. Listen more than you talk. Moderation is good. Be cautious around the powerful. No one can take away your interior dignity or sense of self. Good friends are hard to come by. That’s it, and really, it’s good stuff. It’s just that, if you’ve read the Gospels and then you come to Marcus Aurelius, you see some pretty similar material, and if you’ve read Horace and Ecclesiastes and you come to the Gospels, there’s a fair number of rehashed ideas, and if you’ve read a thousand and a half years of wisdom literature, like we have in our podcast, again, it’s a genre, and like all genres, it has very specific conventions.

At its worst, wisdom literature bloviates and offers proverbs to make very simple points that all of us already know. At its best, wisdom literature takes unexpected directions. You think you know the point that an allegory, or proverb, or speaker, is going to make, and you’re already yawning – only, there’s a sudden change of directions, and what you expect to hear isn’t what you hear. Between these two extremes, Kalilah and Dimnah is, in my opinion, one of the more sophisticated compilations of wisdom literature out there. With layers dating back to the Mahabharata, Kalilah and Dimnah surely evolved and improved with each translation and translocation, with its tales growing richer and more complex every time. Though the book is a collection of animal fables, the fables depict an intricate social world rife with pitfalls and opportunities, in which one moment’s truism might be the next moment’s mistake. In the book, sometimes deep friendships form between natural enemies. At other times, overtures of friendship between predators and prey suddenly turn to bloody violence, and we’re reminded nature, just like human society, doesn’t always conform to our fantasies of peace.

As we’ve noted several times throughout this program, Kalilah and Dimnah is a mirror for princes, or a text intended for the instruction of heads of state. The stories, though their speakers might be lions, jackals, crows, owls, and so on – the stories are overwhelmingly concerned the politically touchy realm of the monarchical court, where kings must trust ministers, and ministers must trust kings for the business of state to proceed. For kings, from the first story onward, placing faith in an advisor, or minister, or steward, is very dangerous business. Ministers are smart, and wily, and many of the tales in Kalilah and Dimnah depict monarchs as vulnerable targets, easily hoodwinked by the artifices of those around them. As we hear midway through the collection, “Kings require many assistants and officials to oversee their numerous affairs, but few men combine the necessary qualities of loyalty, soundness of judgment, and moderation” (12.2). Heads of state, in other words, have to delegate, but in doing so, they expose themselves to the significant hazards of aristocrats and social climbers who stand to benefit from proximity to a king. As a mirror for princes, Kalilah and Dimnah’s ultimate lesson is for kings to be cautious and prudent, and to neither condemn, nor trust, too quickly.

While kings are the protagonists of many of Kalilah and Dimnah’s stories, many tales feature counselors and advisors as main characters. Kalilah and Dimnah, as we’ve already seen, depicts king’s courts as places of exhilarating opportunity and constant danger for subordinates who serve the crown. As the good jackal Kalilah puts it in the first long story in the book, “associating with rulers. . .Scholars have likened a ruler to a steep, rugged mountain where all sorts of pleasant fruit grow, but which is home to lions, leopards, and every kind of ferocious beast – the ascent may be difficult, but staying there is harder yet” (4.13). The metaphor is simple and magnificent. Lofty heights make for precipitous falls. Elsewhere, a character proclaims that “To sail the sea is to run a risk, but to be a ruler’s companion is to run an even greater risk. Though you attend on him with loyalty, uprightness, affection, and good counsel, you’re still liable to stumble and fall, or to be lifted only when you’re on the verge of destruction” (4.71). In numerous tales in Kalilah and Dimnah, royal advisors, some guilty, and others innocent, are humiliated, exiled, and murdered, in spite of the esteemed positions they’ve secured for themselves.

So, in summation, Kalilah and Dimnah shows the relationships between kings and ministers as indispensable, but treacherous at the same time – relationships whose benefits outweigh their costs, but at the same time, relationships that leave both parties exposed to significant risks. If this were the totality of Kalilah and Dimnah – in other words the depiction of kingly courts as dangerous, Darwinistic environments, the book would still be quite interesting. But Kalilah and Dimnah, being an old and storied piece of wisdom literature by the year 750, offers more to kings and ministers than telling each to be guarded. The book acknowledges that in the hard, dangerous world of statecraft, warm and genuine friendships are still possible. Kalilah and Dimnah’s stories depict kings forgiving ministers for their mistakes, and ministers forgiving kings for theirs. The book can be utterly cynical about the self-serving nature of court. Kalilah and Dimnah can also be pretty optimistic, too, demonstrating that an enlightened despot with a qualified retinue of advisors can handle the operations of state quite adeptly. And the book also maps some very detailed specifics for how kings’ courts ought to run. At one point, a minister proclaims, “A counselor should agree with his patron in what he thinks correct, but be gentle when enlightening the patron about any error he might have made – that way, the correct opinion gains prominence when there is hesitation and uncertainty” (7.10). It’s terrific advice for a king’s court, but really, it’s terrific advice for any echelon of society. Don’t call people out, point blank, for being wrong. Be diplomatic and careful, and the best course of action will more likely result from any collaborative operation.

What makes Kalilah and Dimnah an especially appealing work within its genre is that it manages to be shrewd as well as optimistic, leavening optimism and pessimism in a genuinely wide variety of stories that are never particularly predictable. One of the most memorable tales in the whole collection is a very short one that inculcates a devastatingly clear message. Here’s the story. A man was mowing hay when a wolf suddenly appeared and charged him. The man fled. He came to a river, but there was no way across. He couldn’t swim. The wolf was gaining on him. The man decided it was better to chance the river than be eaten alive. He threw himself in the water, and townspeople on the opposite bank came to his rescue and carried him the rest of the way across. Collecting himself as he dried off, the man was about to tell his rescuers why he had jumped in the river. Only, he leaned on a loose section of stone wall, and it collapsed on him, killing him (4.3). That’s it – that’s the whole story. There’s no tidy moral to it, other than that shit happens. But for a collection that so often applauds the power of human intelligence, written within a human millennium in which divine providence was increasingly seen as controlling all of creation, shit happens is a surprisingly modern and profound lesson. During Ibn al-Muqaffa’s own life, over in Northumbria on the island of Britain, the historian Bede was writing his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a book which attributes all the happenings of the universe to a watchful deity. Ibn al-Muqaffa’s tale of the dude escaping the wolf, making it across the river, and then dying anyway, tells a different story. Sometimes, the best laid plans of gods and men sputter out, and walls fall on our heads. It might not be an empowering moral lesson, but it’s absolutely an accurate one.

But to bring our present program to a close, I want to share one final story from Kalilah and Dimnah with you, and return to the subject of Ibn al-Muqaffa and the history of the very early Abbasid period. This is my favorite story from the collection, and I once heard a version of this story with Yiddish roots, and maybe you’ve heard a version of it, too. But here’s the Kalilah and Dimnah version – listen closely for a minute and a half or so – I hope you’ll like this one as much as I do.

Once, there was a holy man. A merchant had taken pity on this devout man, and gave him a bit of honey, and a bit of butter every day. The holy man ate some of his daily allotment. The rest, he saved in a big jar. The holy man was so diligent in saving his butter and honey that eventually he had accumulated a lot of it. One day, the holy man got to dreaming. On his bunk beneath his brimming jar, the holy man decided he’d sell all of the surplus butter, and he’d make enough money for five female goats. He’d breed them, and they’d give birth to kids. Then he’d breed the younger goats, and before long, he’d have a flock of four hundred animals. Then this goat flock could be traded for a hundred cattle, and oxen, and seeds, and he’d begin making profits from produce and milk. Once fortune and property were his, he’d marry a woman, and she’d give birth to a healthy son. The holy man would educate and instruct the youngster, and if the youngster ever stepped out of line, the holy man would whack him with a stick. The holy man already had the stick. As if in anticipation, he swung the stick, and accidentally hit the jar full of honey and butter that he’d been saving for so long, and the mixture slopped down all over his head (9.4). That’s it.

We might say the moral of the story is “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” or that hubristic visions glorious futures are sometimes dashed to pieces by reality. To me, though, maybe because I also spend a lot of time thinking about faraway things, the holy man, lost in fantasies of the future so deeply that he forgets about the present, is a lovable buffoon. We are all, to some extent, dreamers, and we all take plenty of elevator rides back and forth between reality and the more glittery worlds of our imaginations.

While this vacillation between reality and fantasy is quite simply a core part of being human, when Ibn al-Muqaffa translated Kalilah and Dimnah, the story of the holy man with the honey jar must have had a distinct resonance to the Persian intelligentsia of the new empire. Ibn al-Muqaffa and other educated Persian bureaucrats could work long hours, pinch pennies, and save. Their great grandparents had been the lords of a very ancient empire, and their cultural traditions were intercontinental. But they were also living in a hard new reality. Serving Umayyad and then Abbasid Arab caliphs and governors, they could only ascend so high. Their dreams of distinction, like those of the holy man with the honey jar, could be shattered with one chance false move. And though Persians, around about the year 750, had deep cultural knowledge of statecraft and monarchical power politics, having had sophisticated manuals like Kalilah and Dimnah, they were ultimately second-class citizens. Ibn al-Muqaffa, after mastering Arabic and converting to Islam; after scaling the steep, slippery slopes of two different Arab-Islamic regimes, made a single false move for unknown reasons and, as with numerous well-intentioned counselors with fur and feathers in Kalilah and Dimnah, that one false move, tragically sealed his fate.

His story is a sad one. In spite of the fact that he learned Arabic and worked for Umayyad and Abbasid grandees, Ibn al-Muqaffa became a casualty of a new world that sometimes treated political dissidents ruthlessly. At the same time, though, Ibn al-Muqaffa was part of an enormous movement in Arabic literary history – a movement that outlasted even the hardy Abbasid caliphate. This movement was, in a word, bringing the stories of the Pre-Islamic east into books later savored by readers from all over the world. As scholar H.T. Norris writes, within the wild world of ancient Arabian folklore,

Deities were astral, anthropomorphic, arboreal or lithic. They formed loose or local pantheons. Each god or goddess had a special abode. Although the heroes, whether kings, bards, vagabonds or soothsayers, were not the offspring of divinity, they at least possessed superhuman prowess, longevity or intimacy with the supernatural conceived as jinn or metamorphosed creatures – lions, foxes, or vultures, for example. . .Arabian legend is ultimately derived from stories common to the Ancient Eastern civilization. Archaic. . .stories are concerned with denizens of the thickets which threaten their [settlements]. Yet a serpent, kindly treated, [might] sometimes lead to hidden treasure, while the gentleness and beauty of a gazelle may be a deception and occasion an untimely death. Mirages, ruins or dust storms may harbour beneficent or malevolent jinn.⁸

Before monotheism, polytheists and animists saw spirits and consciousness all over nature. With no hierarchy crowned by the sovereign divine, the pagan world sparkled with incidental magic, and doves and owls were as likely to hold secret knowledge as anything else under the sun and moon.

To some extent, it seems as though monotheism’s arrival would have a compressive or flattening influence over the sort of vibrant folklore we find in the Panchatantra, and after it, Kalilah and Dimnah. After all, whenever a one true god shows up, isn’t all of the bustling history of heathenism just a clumsy prequel to monotheism? And the answer, in Abbasid society as well as any other, is of course not. We have always loved parables, personifications, and other basic narrative tools that bring the world around us to life. Beyond the spires of cathedrals and minarets of mosques, folklore is as inextinguishable as it is restless, whether canonized in ancient collections or riffed freely around campfires and village squares. Kalilah and Dimnah, in spite of its author’s tragic death at the hands of an autocratic regime, shows folk traditions surviving with minimal modifications into the early Islamic period. Because while the first generations of Muslims revered, and found wisdom in the Qur’an and the hadiths, they also enjoyed old, splendid, surprising stories about kings, frogs, and crows. [music]

Moving onto Bashshar ibn Burd

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of Ibn al-Muqaffa, and a full summary of the Sanskrit slash Persian slash Arabic compilation called Kalilah and Dimnah. It’s a terrific book, and once again, I’ve put a link in this show’s notes to the New York University Press translation, done by Michael Fishbein and James Montgomery. There’s also a link on my new book on the Odyssey coming out next week.

In our next episode, we will explore the poetry of another author whose life straddled the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. Bashshar ibn Burd, who lived from about 714-783, was, like Ibn al-Muqaffa, a Persian who managed to navigate the high society of the early caliphates. He was, like Ibn al-Muqaffa, a citizen of Basra. Feisty, innovative, passionate, and perceptive, Bashshar was ultimately executed by the Abbasid regime, just like Ibn al-Muqaffa. But Bashshar had a longer career, and as a poet, he set the stage for the next generation of Islamic literature. Bashshar could write Arabic qasidas in the old Bedouin way – meditative long poems in which solitary speakers ruminated in sandscapes astride their trusty camels and horses. But Bashshar’s world was a metropolitan one filled with many people, and many languages; a world of rivers, canals, luxury goods, and audiences hungry for novelty, and he wrote poetry with a figurative restlessness and urbane subject matter suitable to the cityscapes of the new Islamic empires.

So next time, we’re going to take a long look at Bashshar’s love poems, satires, wisdom poems, and panegyrics, and in doing so, get a fuller picture of the culture and sophistication of early Abbasid society.

We will be winding down this season on early Islamic history with a final episode in September of this year. If you liked Kalilah and Dimnah, I can tell you that there is a bookcase full of similarly outstanding early Arabic and Persian literature from the next few centuries afterward, and in future seasons, I’m going to do my best to cover the biggest blockbusters of the Islamic Golden Age. At the moment, I’m working on Season 8, which will cover European literature from about 500-1000 CE. Guys, I don’t have a great title for it yet. The title “Early European Vernacular Literature” sucks. So, too, does “Early Medieval Literature in Europe,” and “European Literature, 500-1000 CE” is not great, either. I’m seriously thinking about calling it, “Beowulf and Shit.” Anyway, while those titles are works in progress, the literature involved could not be better – we’re basically talking about sagas and poetry with Celtic and Germanic roots that started coming together during the eighth and ninth centuries, and I think that heading over to Ireland, Britain, and the North Sea for a season will be a really nice way to continue this very long journey that we’ve been on together.

Thanks for listening to Literature and History. I have a quiz on this program in the Details section of your podcast app if you want to review what you learned about Kalilah and Dimnah. Don’t forget the anonymous survey on the website if you want to throw me some quick advice. I have a song coming up if you want to hear it, and if not, I’ll see you next time, with one of the founding figures of classical Arabic poetry, Bashshar ibn Burd.

Still listening? Alright, it’s been a funny year. Between producing a podcast season on early Islamic history, publishing a book on the Odyssey, and being engaged in two other big projects that I haven’t mentioned yet, my brain has been scurrying through many different periods of literary history. One of those periods, as you can imagine, has been Archaic Greece, a time and place with which, even before the book that’s coming out next week, I had some unfinished business. See, I always wanted to try and sing in Homeric Greek while playing an actual lyre – to do what a real ancient Greek bard would have done – just to be clear since we covered the Odyssey a hundred thousand years ago, bards sang – they did not recite. Anyway, there were some challenges. The difficulty level of singing Homeric poetry is neither easy, nor medium, but instead, bard. The lyre was no problem – it’s not a complicated instrument. The singing – I’m alright – I know I don’t have a rockstar voice, but my rhythm is good and I can carry a tune. So one day, I asked my friend Jack from Ancient Greece Declassified to help me with some sections of the Homeric epics – he has spoken Greek all of his whole life, and he’s a Princeton PhD in classics who loves speaking ancient languages. He helped me out with the rhythm of what you’re about to hear, which is me, singing a section of the Odyssey in Homeric Greek, in actual dactylic hexameter, playing an actual lyre and a frame drum. The following part of the Odyssey is from Book 5, and in it, Odysseus’ raft has capsized and he’s floating in the sea, and he barely makes it to land in Phaeacia. I’ll try to make a few of these with videos on down the road, but for now, in anticipation of my book coming out next week, this, everybody, is what the Odyssey really sounded like in 600 BCE.

References

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