Notes on The Monkey Who Gathers Lotuses
To me, this story seems like a children’s story, like the
turtle and the hare. I think rewriting this story from a more mature standpoint
could be interesting, so my notes will reflect that.
I like this story because it feels like there is a cause and
effect, but it needs to be built upon. The main character, the Brahmadatta,
which is the Buddha born as an animal before his lifetime as the Buddha, is
born as a monkey. His father wants to kill him because he kills all his sons so
that they never usurp him. In the story, the father isn’t very well developed;
he seems to try to sneakily kill his son (trying to hug him to death, trying to
innocently send him to the Ogre’s pond.) However, the Brahmadatta knows his
father wants to kill him, and the father has previously killed all his other
sons, so I think the story could be improved if his father had a reason to try
to stealthily kill his son. Additionally, I think a good villain deserves a
good death. The father dies when he sees the ogre, and his heart explodes. This
is very anticlimactic; it makes it such that the climax of the story is when
the Brahmadatta is gathering the lotuses, not when he returns to confront his
father. One thing that would make the endeavors of the Brahmadatta more
interesting would be a better interaction with the ogre. The ogre praises him
first for his wonderful cleverness, but then says his best three qualities are
his Dexterity, Valor, and Resource. Additionally, the ogre goes from wanting to
eat the monkey to respecting him so much as to serve him, which feels
unbelievable. I think there are a few ways that this could be improved. One
possibility is to remove the ogre from appearing: if avoiding the water would
make the Brahmadatta safe, why would the ogre appear at all? Another solution
would be for the monkey to confront the ogre in some way: either tricking him
or perhaps making a deal with him. I think these changes could make the moral
of the story clearer and perhaps make the story more interesting.
I also had issues imagining the ogre as a turtle, so I wanted to find a good image of a water ogre, and I found this image, which I will probably use for my writing
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