The Wise Man of Naranam and the Great Stone
Aithihyamala (Kerala) · Ages 7-11 · 4 min read
In the hills of Kerala, long ago, there lived a man whom everybody thought rather strange. He came from a place called Naranam, and every single day he did the same peculiar thing.
Each morning he would walk to the foot of a tall green hill, and there he would find a great heavy boulder. He would set his shoulder against it, and he would begin to push. Slowly, slowly, grunting and straining in the sun, he rolled that enormous stone all the way up the hill, step by aching step, until at last he reached the very top.
And then, at the summit, with all his work finally done, he would give the boulder one last push. And he would watch it go rolling, bouncing, crashing all the way back down to the bottom of the hill where it had started. And the strange man of Naranam would throw back his head and laugh out loud with delight, and then walk home, perfectly content.
The villagers shook their heads. “What a foolish way to spend a life,” they said. “All that work, every single day, and at the end of it he has nothing. No wall built, no field ploughed, nothing to keep or sell or show. He pushes a stone up only to let it roll down again. What on earth is the point?”
But the wise man of Naranam was not troubled by their puzzling, and he was certainly not troubled by losing his stone each evening. For he had never been rolling it in order to keep it. He had understood something the busy villagers, with all their keeping and counting, had quite forgotten.
The joy was never going to be in the stone at the top. The joy was in the climbing. It was in the strength of his own shoulder, the warmth of the sun, the steady satisfaction of a hard thing done as well as he could possibly do it. He needed nothing to show at the end, because the doing had already been the whole reward.
And so, while others wore themselves out worrying over what they would get to keep, the strange and happy man of Naranam climbed his hill, and laughed at the bottom, and climbed it again, richer in his own quiet way than any of them.
An original retelling of the legend of Naranath of Naranam from Kerala's Aithihyamala (Garland of Legends), compiled by Kottarathil Sankunni from 1909.
