"The Monkey's Heart" (Rebirth Tale)

Stories of the Buddha's Former Births (The Jataka) edited by E.B. Cowell (Cambridge University Press, 1895), Book 2, No. 20; more at Pitt.edu; updated by Wisdom Quarterly

Mr. Monkey (John Downer/materialismisanaddiction/facebook.com)

   

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisatta [the "Buddha-to-be"] was reborn in the Himalayan foothills as a monkey. He grew strong and sturdy, with a healthy frame, living by a curve of the river Ganges in the forest.

  

Mr. Crocodile (Jon Sevcik/Naturephoto.cz)

Now at that time there was a crocodile dwelling in the Ganges. The crocodile's mate saw the great frame of the monkey, and she conceived a longing to eat his heart. So she said to her mate, "Sir, I desire to eat the heart of that great king of the monkeys!"

  

"Good wife," answered the crocodile, "I live in the water, and he lives on dry land. How can we catch him?"

  

"By hook or by crook," she replied, "he must be caught. If I don't get him, I shall die."

  

"All right," replied the crocodile, consoling her, "don't trouble yourself. I have a plan. I will give you his heart to eat."

  

Kind monkey kissing kitty (animalszooguru)

When the Bodhisatta was sitting on the bank of the Ganges, after taking a drink of water, the crocodile drew near and said to him, "Good monkey, why do you live on bad fruits in this old familiar place? On the other side of the Ganges there are many mango and labuja trees with fruit sweet as honey! Would it not be better to cross over and gain all kinds of wild fruit to eat?"

  

"Lord crocodile," the monkey answered, "the Ganges is deep and wide. How would I get across?"

  

"Well, if you want to go, I shall let you ride on my back, and I will carry you over."

   

The monkey trusted him and agreed. "Come here, then," beckoned the crocodile. "Up on my back with you!" Up the monkey climbed. But when the crocodile had swum a little way, he plunged the monkey under the water.

  

"Good friend, you are letting me sink!" cried the monkey. "What is that for?"

  

Nagas surround mammal in cage (wikipedia)

The crocodile roared, "You think I am carrying you out of pure good nature? Not a bit of it! My wife has a longing to eat your heart, and I intend to give it to her!"

   

"Friend," explained the monkey, "it is nice of you to tell me. But if our hearts were inside us, when we monkeys go swinging among the tree tops they would be all knocked to pieces!"

   

"Well, then, where do you keep it?" asked the crocodile.

  

The Bodhisatta pointed out a fig tree with clusters of ripe fruit standing close by. "See there," he said, "hanging on that fig tree? There are our hearts."

  

"If you will show me your heart," offered the crocodile, "then I won't kill you."

  

Monkey's kindness to pigeon (paleonym)

"Take me to the tree, and I will point it out to you."

  

The crocodile ferried him to the place. The monkey leaped off his back, and climbing up the fig tree sat high in it. "Oh, silly crocodile!" he yelled back. "You thought that there were creatures that kept their hearts in the treetops! You are silly, and now you are outwitted! You may keep your [karmic] fruit for yourself. Your body is great, but you have no sense!"

  

Then to explain this idea he uttered the following stanzas:
 

Roseapple, jackfruit, mangoes, too, across the water there I see;

Enough of them, I want them not; my fig is good enough for me!

Great your scaly body, verily, but how small your serpent wit!

Now go your own way, crocodile, for I have had the best of it.

   

The crocodile, feeling as silly and miserable as if he had lost a thousand pieces of money, went back sorrowing to the place where he lived. More

• Housewife raised by monkeys in Colombia
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I was raised by wild monkeys!

Piper Weiss, Shine (Yahoo! "Women Who Shine"); Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

Cute monkeys are savages with base appetites -- but they also exhibit compassion and other emotions. Here they are seen in Bali molesting another mammal (odditieszone.com).

  

TRUE STORY: When Vanessa James was a little girl, her mother would tell her bedtime stories of growing up like Tarzan in the jungle raised by a colony of monkeys.

  

As James got older, she learned those accounts were not fantasy but part of her mother's unbelievable history.
 
Between the ages of four and ten, Marina Chapman's family consisted of 20 or so Capuchin monkeys, native to the jungles of South America. Her memory of how it all started is hazy: She remembers sorting peas in her village when in an instant a hand covered her mouth and she awoke in the jungle.
 
"All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth," James, told London's Sunday Times this past week. "It's assumed that the kidnap went wrong,"

Two days after fending for herself, she was approached by a colony of monkeys who taught her by example to forage, feed, and survive as one of their own [thereby saving the life of a fellow mammal].

  

"Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and, little by little, learned to fend for herself," according to a press release for the Marina's memoir, The Girl With No Name, to be released in 2013 by Pegasus Books.

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As Chapman adapted to jungle life, she lost any language she had learned in her early years and instead developed an inhuman ability to scale trees and to communicate with creatures native to the forest. 

  

Marina Chapman (thesundaytimes.co.uk)

After more than five years, she was discovered by hunters who sold her into slavery in exchange for a parrot. (Help victims of child sex trafficking; here's how.)
 
A year later she escaped, narrowly avoiding a life of prostitution. She then lived off the streets in Colombia, relying on her stealth knowledge gleaned, in part, from her education in the jungle.

   

In her 20's while working as a household staff for a Colombian family, she was brought on a trip to Bradford, England. There she met her future husband at a church, a bacteriologist named John Chapman, and she never left. [Karma works in mysterious ways, unimaginable to our logic-bound, linear minds.]

   

Together they raised two children. She worked as a cook and later in social services she helped at-risk youth.

  

Over the past five years, her daughter Vanessa, now a 23-year-old film composer, has been devoted to transcribing her mother's memory -- matching the nuts and berries and wildlife in Chapman's jungle recollections with those native to the area she was abandoned in.

  

Recently, mother and daughter traveled back to Colombia to find Chapman's long-lost family, reconnecting with some surrogates who took her in in her teens. She even tried re-entering the jungle before being stopped by military officials.

 

After Vanessa was convinced she'd pieced together her mother's journey, the next challenge was convincing a co-writer, literary agent, and publisher that Marina's unbelievable accounts were true.
 

Humans return the favor (imprint.printmag.com)

Lynne Barrett-Lee came on board as the ghostwriter after poring over Vanessa's mounds of research and meeting face-to-face with Marina, whom she immediately understood to be a woman with no ordinary past. Publishers at Pegasus Books, too, claim to have gone through an exhaustive verification process before claiming the title.

There have only been a handful of modern-day accounts of feral children surviving this unique upbringing and ultimately assimilating back into human life. In 1999, a young boy was rescued in the Uganda jungle after being raised by monkeys. It took him eight years to learn to speak again. More

• Monkey-woman Marina Chapman's memoir, The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys, compiled with her daughter, ghostwritten by Lynne Barrett-Lee, will be released in April 2013 (Pegasus Books)
• Me Tarzana, Queen of the Jungle (Sunday Times)

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How our "Hidden Brain" thinks for us

Morning Edition (NPR.org, 1/25/10); Wisdom Quarterly

After making a silly mistake, it's not uncommon for a person to say, "Oops -- I was on autopilot." In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there's actually a lot of truth to that.

Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR's Steve Inkseep -- conscious and unconscious, pilot and autopilot -- and we are constantly switching back and forth between the two.

Hidden Brain (Read excerpt)

"The problem arises when we [switch] without our awareness," Vedantam says, "and the autopilot ends up flying the plane, when we should be flying the plane."

The autopilot mode can be useful when we're multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us. Vedantam says that when we interact with people from different backgrounds in high-pressure situations, it's easy to rely -- unconsciously -- on heuristics....

"Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures."

- Shankar Vedantam

Take Back The Controls

Racism can end (anothervoice-greenleaf.org)

In American society, [social] colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality.
  
"Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways."
    

Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode -- as long as you are aware of when it is on. The Hidden Brain is about how to "take back the controls."
  
So if the human psyche is just a big constellation of conscious and unconscious cognition -- which thoughts represent the real you? More (LISTEN)

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