This teaching tale comes from one of my friends and mentors Melkom Melomian the ambulance driver of my father’s hospital in Tehran, Iran. He taught me to drive and taught me many more important things.
Three men each had a bag of raisins the first one was a pessimist and alawys ate the worst raisin. Thus [...]
Mullah Nasrudin was at a boring party. So he sat in a courner and every now and then he would smirk and perhaps even laugh.
As I mentioned it was a boring party. So this guy went and started talking to the Mullah and said, "What are you doing?"
"Nothing, I’m just telling myself jokes," replied Nasrudin.
"That’s [...]
This teaching story is another from te Zeb Buddhist tradition:
A farmer’s wife had died and he asked a Buddhist priest to recite the Sutras (Buddhist religious texts) for her. At the end of the recitation he asked the priest, "Do you think my wife will gain merit from this?"
The priest replied, "Of course. In fact,not [...]
A domestic cat lived in the lap of luxury but still wanted more and more. One day the greedy cat heard that he was a distant relative to the king of the jungle. He left his comfortable home to search his cousin fifth removed. After much hardship and many perilous adventures he arrived at the [...]
One property of teaching stories is that they come from deep within the human psyche and will be told in different cultures using fictional and historical heroes of the locality.
Many teaching stories are mythological and a few did happen to somebody at sometime but not necessarily to the person ascribed to. The value of the [...]
This story is one that I use in my Transformative Imagination seminars. It is typically not so long. I ended up using Mullah Nasrudin as the hero of the teaching story and added a little about Iranian foods and culture. Most words are defined when first used.
The Shahanshah’s son (Shahanshah = king of kings), the [...]
In the olden days there was a wise physician who had an eager apprentice. This student kept asking the master if he could prescribe for one of the patients. The teacher kept repeating that the student was not yet ready.
The pupil kept importuning and pleading to serve a patient. Eventually [...]
Many nations of the Middle East claim the Mullah Nasrudin as their own, however, the Mullah, like all mythological characters, belongs to all humanity. Mullah Nasrudin is a wise fool and his stories have many meanings on multiple levels of reality. These stories show among other things that things are not always as they appear [...]
