the king and the dove

A dove, chased by a hawk, fell into the lap of King Shibi and asked for refuge. The king said: you are safe here.

The hawk landed on the sill and made an argument that has never really been answered: the dove is my food. Protect it and you starve me. What kind of mercy is that?

Shibi did not lecture the hawk. He called for a weighing scale. The dove in one pan; in the other, cut from his own thigh, flesh of the king, equal to the dove's weight. But the scale would not balance. However much he cut, the dove sat heavier — until the king himself stepped into the pan, whole. The story says the hawk and the dove then dropped their disguises: gods, come to see whether the famous compassion of Shibi was an ornament or a load-bearing wall.

Grandmothers have told this one for two thousand years, and children always fasten onto the same detail — the scale. They are right to. The scale is the story's whole engine: compassion that costs nothing is not being weighed at all. Shibi is not asked to feel sorry for the dove. He is asked what he will put in the pan.

Nobody at your dinner table will be asked for a thigh. The pans stay small in a household — ten minutes of listening you had earmarked for the phone, the last piece of barfi, the parking spot conceded. But the scale is the same scale. Children learn what refuge means by watching what the adults are willing to place opposite a small creature's trouble.

Tell it tonight if the table is in the mood for a story. Let the hawk have his argument in full — children respect a story that does not cheat.