Week 12: Reading Notes - The Measure of Rice Part A

The Measure of Rice 

I choose to read Jatakas because I really like short stories. They have the best moral of the stories and I can learn how to create my own short story by looking at the ones I read. Short stories do not have much time to develop so they really have to start out good to grab the attention of the readers. The story is very valuable because it shows how greed can take over and really destroy you. The story started out by introducing an important character from the story. One of the main character, the king, shows greed to make a little more money then he was already making. He was not happy with what he was getting. He tried to fool people and get a valuer that was a peasant so he knew nothing about values. The king thought that this would be beneficial but it turns out it was not. Another nice twist in the story was the peasant that was called to be used for the king’s benefit turned out to also help out horse dealer by valuing the horses by the ‘measure of rice’. At the end everyone got what they deserved. The honest valuer stayed honest to the king which the king did not like and it back fired on him. As we got to the end of the story the story kept building up because the horses were valued a ‘measure of rice’ but no one new what that meant until the end. Measure of rice sounds very little so the king must of been really happy until the end when he finds out that measure of rice really was worth the whole city that the king ruled. The moral of the story is to not be so greedy that it harms you in the end.

The Measure of Rice. Source. 

The Measure of Rice. Source. More Jataka Tales By Ellen C. Babbitt 2015.