The cuckoo

The name of this blog - is inspired by the 19th century tale of the prince who became a cuckoo, one of Tibet’s most cherished tales, illustrative of Buddhist teachings.

I discovered this book in Modern Books in Dover Lane, in Calcutta, run by the Tiwari brothers. (Over more than 15 years, I have bought so many books from this shop, and how much I've been enriched and enabled by those books. But the Tiwaris are humble, barely educated. In my consciousness, the soil of the region they are from, eastern U.P., is a sacred mother.) The Prince who became a Cuckoo: A Tale of Liberation, by Lo-Dro, translated by Geshe Wangyal, Theatre Arts Books, New York, 1982. I read this in late-1996 - long after I had bought the book, which in turn was long after I first saw it - within a context of a frenetic personal inner quest, and at a specific circumstantial juncture of explosive psycho-emotional moorings. How can I describe what this book /tale means to me?!

The story is about a prince of Varanasi, who along with his friend learned the practice of mind-transference and was later tricked by the friend into being trapped in the body of a cuckoo. The friend enters the prince's body and usurps his place. The cuckoo-prince accepts his new situation as an opportunity to benefit others, and finding himself able to communicate not only with human beings but also with the birds and animals he lived among, he remains in the forest to teach them the Buddha's Dharma.

This is a mind-expanding story, a resource for personal transformation, nutrition tenderly provided to the starving soul.