The Monkey King and the Bridge

4-6 min read
13 pages

The monkey king and the bridge, a Jataka tale to read aloud. Eighty thousand monkeys, one river, and a gap that has to be crossed somehow.

On the bank of the Ganges there grew a mango tree so large that a whole troop of monkeys lived in it — eighty thousand of them, and their king was the biggest and the oldest.

The mangoes of that tree were sweeter than any in India, and the monkey king had one rule: no fruit was ever to fall into the river. Every mango on a branch over the water was picked before it ripened.

One year they missed one.

It went into the river and downstream, and a long way down it was caught in a net and carried to the king of Benares, who tasted it and asked where such a thing could grow.

So the king came upriver with his men and his boats, and he found the tree, and he found the eighty thousand monkeys in it, and he gave the order to surround it and shoot.

The monkeys ran to the top. The tree stood at the water's edge, and the nearest branch on the far bank was too far to jump — for any of them except one.

The monkey king jumped it. He crossed the whole gap in a single leap, which nobody had ever done, and landed in a bamboo thicket on the other side.

Then he cut a long bamboo cane, tied one end to his own feet, and jumped back with the other end in his hands.

The cane was too short. He had measured the gap and not the knot, and when he reached the tree he had to hold the branch with his arms and stretch his body across the rest of the distance himself.

«Cross,» he said. And eighty thousand monkeys went over him, one after another, on his back and along his outstretched arms, from the tree to the bamboo and away into the forest.

The king of Benares stood in his boat and watched the whole of it.

When the last monkey had gone over, the cane and the king came down together. The men lifted him out of the water and brought him to the king, who had by then put his bow away and had no further interest in mangoes.

«They were not yours,» said the king of Benares. «Why did you do that?» «They were mine to look after,» said the monkey. «That is a different thing, and it is the whole of the job.»

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Text source: From the Jataka tales, the Indian collection of birth stories written down in Pali from around 300 BC. Public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

The Monkey King and the Bridge

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