Story Lab: Storybook Research Week 6

 

For this week, I am doing some further research on the Buddhist jataka tale of a community of carpenters exiled to an island where half of them are later killed by a flood.

Details from the Buddhist flood myth:

  • A thousand families of carpenters in a town near Benares
    • Would take advanced payments for building beds, chairs, or even homes, but would never make anything
    • The people harassed these carpenters daily, so they decided to move
  • Some of them went into the forest to cut down trees to construct boats and they launched down a river, retrieving their families in the night, and headed to the ocean
    • They reached an island in the middle of the sea with plenty of plants, with fruit trees, rice, sugar-cane, and more
    • Another man was there who had been shipwrecked and he lived there for a while and roamed naked with long hair
  • The carpenters were wary if the island was haunted by demons, so 7 men prepared to explore the island
    • While these men were exploring, they heard the happy singing of the castaway about how he happy he was happier than those in India were
    • The men found the castaway, at first taking him for a goblin
    • The man tells them that they will not need to work hard and they can eat and party all they want, but when they relieve themselves, they must dig a hole and subsequently bury it, as demons live on the island
  • The carpenter families were under 2 master workmen, one that was greedy and quite stupid and the other who was wise
  • As the families lived there, they became fat and happy
    • Because of this, they decided to celebrate and made alcohol from sugar cane, and relieved themselves without burying it while drunk
  • The demons were upset and talked amongst themselves about flooding the island to purify it
    • They decided to bring a flood 2 weeks from that day, but one deity did not wish for them to perish, so he warned the carpenters of the impending flood
    • But, another god who was bent on killing these men with a flood came after the kind god and tells the people that the previous god simply did not want them to live there and there was no danger of flooding
  • The foolish master workman believed the cruel god while the wise one believed the kind god
    • So the 500 carpenters that were greedy and loved all the good things of the island continued to party
    • The remaining carpenters, who followed the wise man, headed the warning of the first god and built a boat just in case the flood was to occur
  • On the day of the full moon, the day of the flood, the wise man and his followers boarded the ship while the foolish man and his followers thought the wave they saw would not actually flood the island and stayed, being swept away and killed
  • The Master (who tells the stories in the Jataka) tells the lesson of this story, saying to look at the future and not simply enjoy the pleasures of now, and that he was in fact the Master

Below are some images I think I might incorporate into my storybook:
A carpenter hard at work!
This boat probably wouldn't fit 502 people, but it is made of wood!
Yay, islands!






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