The Gatiloke stays in the book's fifth part, among trees and kings and the smallest of creatures. A grasshopper, fed full in the open field, mocks the bare sangke tree that strained to grow like the great heartwood trees of the mountain, and lost all its leaves for the striving. A crow settles on a dog's corpse adrift on the river and pecks and eats in forgetfulness, until the current has carried it out of sight of the banks — and it cannot win back to the shore, and sinks, in the book's own brief telling, by its own heedlessness. Isvara, who built the world, offers to remake any creature that displeases itself, and hears the monkey, the bear, the elephant, the camel, the great fish and the ant each praise its own body and find the fault in the next. And a king of kings who scorns the black ant king's friendship learns, on a night of pain with a creature deep in his ear, that no Garuda and no lion can do the small work of the small.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
00:04 — The Grasshopper and the Sangke Tree
05:21 — The Crow and the Dog's Corpse
06:48 — Mahissaradhipati, Isvara, Who Built the World
14:55 — King Mahacakra Mahissaradhipati and the Black Ant King
From the Gatiloke by Suttantaprija Ind (1859–1924), Cambodia's treasury of Khmer folk tales, first published in parts in Phnom Penh in 1914–1921 — public domain, and told here in a fresh in-house English rendering made from the Khmer text, in the book's own order. One question-chapter near the collection's opening is held back under house rule — its matter is murder itself, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the collection's written register, in its place. One further tale of the book's second part — the tale of Bhikkhu Sok, the Pnong teacher — is likewise held back under house rule: its matter is a whole lineage put to death, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the Singha-To who wanted the chief's daughter — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a beating given to a creature first stripped of its defences, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the crocodile and the cart-driver — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing done with an axe, at a judge's word, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the treatise — the tale of the hunter and the parrot — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing by a serpent's bite, planned and done in the tale's open scene, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fourth part — the fable of the old woman whom desire unmade — is likewise held back under house rule: its matter is a mother's desire set against her own son, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place. One further tale of the book's fifth part — the tale of the abbot and his two students — is likewise held back under house rule: its close is a killing in the tale's open scene, a wild buffalo's goring of the teacher in the forest, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the register, in its place.
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