The Broken Pot

Every single day, an old woman would walk from her home to a nearby river. The old woman carried a heavy wooden pole on her shoulders. On each end of the pole was a large clay pot.

One of these pots was perfect. It delivered the full portion of water through the walk from the river back to the woman’s home. The other pot, however, cracked at the side. By the time the woman reached home, the other pot lost water and was only half full.

The woman still brought water in the two pots and this went on for two full years. 

The perfect pot was very proud of itself.

However, the poor cracked pot was unhappy. It was ashamed of its imperfections because it could achieve only half of what it wanted to do. 

One day the cracked pot finally spoke to the woman. “I am ashamed of myself. I want to apologise to you because you do all this hard work, you do not get the full value of your efforts. Because I leak the water all the way back to your house.” The old woman smiled gently at the pot. “Do you notice that there are wild beautiful flowers on your side of the path? But nothing on the other pot's side.” She nodded at the pot. “I have always known about your flaw. So I planted flower seeds on your side of the path. Every day as we walk back from the river for the past two years, you have been watering those seeds. I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my table. Without you being what you are, I would not have this beauty to grace my home.” 

That was when the broken pot realised that it may be cracked and flawed, but it was still useful because it had created something beautiful.

Adapted from Folklore around the World

The Farmer and the Bamboo & Other Stories

 

In a particular village, there was a farmer whose neighbours planted crops that could be harvested easily. But this farmer had great vision; he did not follow what his neighbours did. He cleared a plot of land that was seemingly unremarkable and pressed small seeds into the earth.

He hauled buckets of water from the stream every morning and enriched the soil every evening.

By the end of the first year, the man’s neighbours leaned over their fences. They had harvested grain, while this farmer had nothing.

The neighbours laughed at the farmer "Your field has nothing! You waste your strength on a patch of dust."

The farmer simply smiled and continued to water his land.

The second year came. The rains arrived, and the sun beat down. The farmer continued his ritual. The earth, however, remained flat and silent as before.

This happened even in the third year.

By the fourth year, the farmer’s own family began to doubt him.

His son came forward, "Father, this land is barren. Please, let us plant some other grain."

But the farmer looked at the ground and did not do so.

Then came the fifth year. In the middle of the fifth month, a tiny green spike, no longer than a finger, came out of the crust of the earth.

Then another, and another.

What happened next was a legend.

This was the bamboo. Once the bamboo broke the surface, it began to grow at a terrifying speed. It did not grow by inches, but by feet.

In just six weeks, the bamboo soared to eighty feet into the air.

The villagers were in awe, "This is a miracle! Eighty feet in six weeks?"

But the farmer shook his head. "This did not grow eighty feet in six weeks; it grew eighty feet in five years. If I had stopped watering for a single day during those four years of silence, the root would have withered, and this would never have happened."

There is a story of a young boy. This boy was known as the dullard of his school.

His classmates could understand and compose poetry easily, but this boy stumbled over basic language syntax. He just could not understand it.

Finally, after failing another exam, the boy packed his belongings and walked away from the Academy.

He walked for days and finally reached the banks of a river.

There, he saw an old woman holding a thick, jagged iron bar, rubbing it against a large, smooth river stone.

Curious, the boy came forward. "Mother, what are you doing?"

"I am making a needle," the old woman told him.

The boy gasped. "A needle? From this heavy bar? This would take a hundred years!"

The old woman did not stop.

She looked at the river, and then at the boy. "Look at the river waters. The water is very soft, and still, it has hollowed out the granite cliff over ten thousand years.” The woman pointed at the bar in her hands. “Now the stone is hard, but I am constant. Every day, the bar loses a layer of its rough skin. Every day, it will come closer to becoming a needle. The only way I can fail is if I stop."

The little boy looked at the river stone and the old woman and said nothing else.

He returned to his academy. He did not compete with the geniuses of his Academy.

Instead, like the farmer, he spent years mastering a single rule of grammar, then another.

Eventually, this little boy grew up to become a great grammarian. He wrote the definitive codex on the structure of the language, a work so precise it was used even centuries later.

There was no secret. As the grammarian would tell people, "Most people fail not because they lack talent, but because they lack consistency."

Adapted from Folklore Around the World

The Deaf Frog

Long ago there was a well that was a towering cylinder of slick stone. On the top of the well there was a jagged rim that seemed to touch the clouds. For the colony of frogs living in the damp darkness at the bottom, the rim was the ‘Great Beyond’ - and that was a place of sunlight and dragonflies that many spoke of. 

But none of the frogs of the well had seen it. 

One day, a group of young frogs decided they had spent enough of their lives in the shadows. 

They announced a competition - the first frog to reach the top of the well would be crowned as the King of the Marshlands.

A massive crowd of frogs gathered at the base to watch. 

As the competitors took their first leaps onto the slippery walls, the crowd realized the problem.

"It’s too high," croaked a frog, shaking his head. "Look at the slime on the stones."

“It is not doable.” Another frog agreed. 

"They don’t have the strength.”

As the climb began, the frogs leaped with fervor. But the walls were slippery. For every few inches of progress the frogs were met with a slip. 

One by one, the competing frogs began to tire.

The crowd’s voices grew louder as every frog gave up. 

"Give up!" 

"You will hurt yourselves!” 

Under the weight of these words, the frogs began to falter. 

One frog, hearing the cries of his friends, looked down and lost his footing. He tumbled back into the mud. 

Another frog listened to the warnings about the heat of the sun at the top. He grew fearful and stopped midway.

Soon, only two frogs remained. One was a large, muscular bullfrog and the other was a tiny, unassuming green frog with bright, inquisitive eyes.

The crowd intensified their shouting. "Save yourselves!"

The bullfrog, hearing the logic in their screams felt the burn in his muscles, 

He looked at the stone walls and let go. He fell through the air, landing with a heavy splash in the pool below.

But the tiny frog? 

The tiny frog kept jumping.

He did not look down. He did not even look at the crowd. Every time he slipped, he simply found a new grip. 

When the crowd yelled, ‘You'll never make it!’ he seemed to jump with even more vigor. 

When they screamed, ‘It’s too dangerous!’ he climbed faster.

The onlookers were baffled. Was the little frog mocking them? 

Finally, with one last leap, the tiny frog’s feet hooked over the rim of the well. He pulled himself up into the blinding gold of the afternoon sun. 

He had found the light.

Hours later, after the tiny frog had explored the wonders of the upper world, he hopped back down to the well’s edge to see his friends.

When he eventually returned to the bottom, the colony crowded around him and they looked at him with awe.

"How did you do it?"

"How did you find the strength when everyone told you it couldn't be done?"

The tiny frog did not say a word.

It was then that the little frog’s mother stepped forward "My son cannot hear you. He has been deaf since the day he was spawned."

The realization hit the colony like a physical blow. 

The little frog had not been brave. He had simply been unable to hear their doubt. 

Every time they had screamed that he would fail, he thought they were cheering him on. He had interpreted their waving as gestures of encouragement.

That was how he had managed to reach the top.

-From Folklore from around the World

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