Monkey Judgement
Two fat cats lived in a village. One cat was black, and the other was brown with dappled skin. They always quarreled with each other, using their sharp teeth and claws.
One day the black cat while wandering around, saw a piece of bread never a house. She quickly reached there and picked it up.
The brown cat was watching the black cat from a distance. She reached there hurriedly and said to the black cat, “Share this bread with me, or else I shall snatch it for you.”
The black cat refused to share it and they began quarreling. There was a monkey sitting in a tree. He saw them quarrelling and reached there to settle their dispute. But the cats kept on fighting.
The monkey said, “Do not fight my sisters. I am like your elder brother. I shall divide your bread into two equal parts in order to settle your dispute.”
Both the cats agreed. The monkey brought a balance. He divided the bread into two parts and put one each on both pans of the balance. Now he lifted the balance to weight the pieces of the bread.
He saw that one pan of the balance lowered due to the little extra weight on one side. He tore a little from the heavier side to make it weigh equal. He put the excess piece of the bread in his mouth and gobbled it up.
Now weighing the pieces the second time. He found that the other pan of the balance had lowered. He tore another piece from this pan to make it equal. He put the excess piece in his mouth again and gobbled up.
But again the other pan became heavy and lowered. He again tore it. Thus, he tore pieces from both sides of the bread till only small pieces were left. He ate those pieces also and said, “Sisters, since there was hardly anything left on the pans of the weighting balance, I decided to finish that also, and hence I have finished it. I knew the left over quantity would not have been sufficient to assuage your hunger.”
The monkey left them staring at each other utterly confused. They had understood that they had been thoroughly cheated by the cunning monkey.
The brown cat with dappled skin said to the black cat, “Sister, what is done cannot be undone; but let us take a lesson from it, and that is – ‘if we have to avoid being cheated, we have to stop quarreling’. Let others not take advantage of our feuds.”
