Story: The Master Carpenter

An ape plays at carpenter.

Illustration by E. Boyd Smith.

One day, many thousands of years ago in a distant country, a young carpenter, Rajendra, was making a long table as a gift for his new bride. He spent all day crafting it, but was never able to get it how he wanted. It was always a little too rough or a little too wobbly for his taste.

Each day, a great many neighbors would come by Rajendra’s workshop to see how his table was coming along. They would look through the open window and talk with Rajendra. He had made progress and it was a decent table, but the carpenter was never satisfied with it. True, the villagers thought, it wasn’t fit for a king, but it would do well enough for a young man and his rather modest family.

After a year of working on this table and trying to perfect it, he gave up. He had accidentally cut a gash across his palm with the corner of the table and this proved the last straw. He moved on to other projects and never told his bride about the table. Nor did he tell the neighbors that he had given up on it; he was embarrassed to even think about it.

One day, when the neighbors came by to see how Rajendra’s table was going, they were astonished. It was sanded so well that nary a bump could be felt on its surface. It was lacquered so well that it shone as brilliantly as the sun. One of the men sat on it and found that there wasn’t even a hint of wobble to the table.

They shouted for Rajendra to come talk, which he did.

The eldest among them asked, “Rajendra, how did you create such an amazing table?”

“I…” Rajendra turned around and saw what looked like his table, but which shone brilliantly in the morning light. He pressed his hand against it and saw that it was extremely sturdy.

“Surely,” the eldest continued, “you are a master craftsman.”

Rather than telling them the truth, Rajendra claimed the work as his own. Each morning  after this, Rajendra would wake up to find that whatever project he had started the previous day would be completely finished. He thought he must be a master craftsman after all, but only when he was sleeping. He figured that he had been crafting the amazing furniture in his sleep before returning to bed.

So popular did Rajendra’s pieces of furniture become that even the royals started to make orders for it. Rajendra made a great deal of money off of these orders. Soon, he and his wife had more money than they knew what to do with.

On one particularly stormy night, two pilgrims from a foreign land showed up at Rajendra’s door and asked for shelter. Now, Rajendra’s house was still very small and could barely hold he and his wife. He told the travelers he would house them, but they would have to be content with the workshop. Being perfectly content to be out of the rain, they accepted Rajendra’s offer. He showed them to the workshop, which stood a few hundred feet from the house.

In the middle of the night, these two travelers were woken up by the sound of saws and hammers and sanding. Before fully waking up, they thought it strange, if not rude, that the carpenter should be working at this hour. They stood up and spied a monkey at work in the shop. It was running around, grabbing tools, measuring logs, and doing all that a carpenter did.

“This is surely a brilliant monkey,” one of the men said. The other man agreed.

In the morning, the two men continued on their way and told each person they met about the brilliant monkey in Rajendra’s workshop. Before the day was through, all of the villagers had heard the story of the carpenter monkey. In the evening, when Rajendra came out of his workshop to speak with the other men of the village, they all laughed at him.

“Why are you laughing at me?” he asked.

They replied, “You are no master craftsman! You have only taken credit for the work of a monkey!”

From that day on, Rajendra vowed to never take credit for someone else’s work. He also began to appreciate his own work more. True, it wasn’t perfect, but he had made it himself.  

Author's Note

This is an adaptation of the story, "The Carpenter and the Ape" from Dutton's Fables of Bidpai. It's quite a departure from the original story. In the original story, the monkey tries to act like a carpenter, but soon gets its tail stuck between two pieces of wood and is punished by the actual human carpenter. In my own version, I decided to give the monkey a much happier story. Rather than being quite foolish, this monkey is actually a prolific carpenter and tremendously skilled. Nothing bad happens to the monkey in my own story; instead, the carpenter receives his own moral lesson.

Bibliography

Maude Dutton. The Tortoise and the Geese and Other Fables of Bidpai (1908).