Saturday, February 21, 2009

ACK-072: The King in a Parrot's Body

An out of print ACK #191

Inside cover story

Jain monks took a keen interest in the spiritual uplift of the common people. To make their difficult philosophy accessible to the layman, they used the medium of stories.

Most of the stories teach that meritorious acts bring prosperity & evil acts untold misery. According to Jain philosophy, man is the master of his own destiny. He reaps what he sows. No outside force can help him get what he does not deserve, nor can it prevent him from getting what he does deserve.

The story of King Shuklapaksha has an underlying allegory. Shuklapaksha literally means the bright half of a lunar month and Krishnapaksha, the dark half. The king symbolises ggod and the minister evil. The confrontation between the two, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, is the subject of this story.

Many many thanks to an “Anonymous friend” for providing ACK scan.

9 comments:

  1. another good story for the weekend:).

    Demonoid Fan

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  2. Demonoid Fan: Welcome! It's one of my favorite ACK. :)

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  3. Vineet: Welcome! :)

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  4. Thanks Prabhat! I'm sorry for not being regular with commenting these days, but my left hand typing skills are only now beginning to improve! Thanks so much! :)

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  5. Thanks Prabhat.. this was one of my favourite ACKs.. coming to think of it, a good number of them were favourites :-)

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  6. adibud34: Welcome! Don't worry about comments. Just check regularly & download. :)

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  7. Sridhar: Welcome! Glad to know you also liked this issue. You are true there are a good numbers of these.

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  8. thanks!! Prabhat Did I mention that you have saved me a lot of money!!. The used-book storewallah charges around Rs.20-25 for each of these. But yeah even then u rarely get an out-of-print book.

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