India

Fables appeared early in India, but it is impossible to determine whether they are older or later than the Greek. Undoubtedly there was mutual influence from very early times, for indirect contacts between Greece and India (by trade routes) had existed long before the time of Alexander the Great. In the form in which they are now known, the Greek fables are the older, but this may be an accident of transmission.

The fable was apparently first used in India as a vehicle of Buddhist instruction. Some of the Jatakas, birth stories of the Buddha, which relate some of his experiences in previous animal incarnations, resemble Greek fables and are used to point a moral. They may date from as far back as the 5th century bc, though the written records are much later.

The most important compilation is The Fables of Bidpai, or the Panca-tantra (“Five Chapters”), a Sanskrit collection of beast fables. The original has not survived, but it has been transmitted (via a lost Pahlavi version) as the mid-8th-century Arabic Kalīlah wa Dimnah. Kalīlah and Dimnah are two jackals, counselors to the lion king, and the work is a frame story containing numerous fables designed to teach political wisdom or cunning. From the Arabic this was translated into many languages, including Hebrew, which rendition John of Capua used to make a Latin version in the 13th century. This, the Directorium humanae vitae (“Guide for Human Life”), was the chief means by which Oriental fables became current in Europe. In The Fables of Bidpai, animals act as men in animal form, and little attention is paid to their supposed animal characteristics. It is in this respect that they differ most from the fables of Aesop, in which animals behave as animals.

China

Chinese philosophers from the Qin dynasty (221–206 bc) onward often used extended metaphors (from which fable is the logical development) to make their points. This is believed to reflect the fact that, as “realistic” thinkers, the Chinese generally did not favour more abstract argument. Thus simple allegory helped to stimulate audience interest and to increase the force of an argument. A century earlier, Mencius, a Confucian philosopher, had used the following little allegory in illustrating his theory that an effort has to be made if man’s natural goodness is to be recovered:

A man will begin searching when his dog or chicken is missing; but he does not go searching for the good character he was born with after it is lost. Is this not regrettable?

The same writer also used a parable to bring home his point that mental training could not be hurried, but was a gradual process:

A man in Sung sowed seeds in a field. The seedlings grew so slowly, however, that one day he took a walk through the field pulling at each one of the seedlings. On returning home he announced that he was exhausted, but that he had helped the seedlings’ growth. His son, hurrying to the field, found the seedlings dead.

Tales such as this were often borrowed from folklore, but others were probably original creations, including a striking story that opens the Zhuangzi, a summa of Daoist thought. It makes the point that ordinary people frequently deplore the actions of a man of genius because they are unable to understand his vision, which is not answerable to the laws of “common sense”:

A giant fish, living at the northern end of the world, transformed itself into a bird so that it could make the arduous flight to the southernmost sea. Smaller birds, measuring his ambition against their own capabilities, laughed at the impossibility of it.

But the full development of fable, as it is understood in the West, was hindered by the fact that Chinese ways of thinking prohibited them from accepting the notion of animals that thought and behaved as humans. Actual events from the past were thought to be more instructive than fictitious stories, and this led to the development of a large body of legendary tales and supernatural stories. Between the 4th and 6th centuries, however, Chinese Buddhists adapted fables from Buddhist India in a work known as Bore jing, and they also began to make use of traditional Chinese stories that could further understanding of Buddhist doctrines.

Japan

In Japan the Koji-ki (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon-shoki (8th century; “Chronicles of Japan”), both of them official histories of Japan, were studded with fables, many of them on the theme of a small intelligent animal getting the better of a large stupid one. The same is true of the fudoki (local gazetteers dating from 713 and later). The form reached its height in the Kamakura period (1192–1333). Toward the end of the Muromachi period (1338–1573), Jesuit missionaries introduced the fables of Aesop to Japan, and the influence of these can be traced in stories written between then and the 19th century.