Reading list · 78 items
Panchatantra Stories — All 78, in Hindi and English
Every story in the Panchatantra, in the order Vishnu Sharma tells them — five books of fables, each with its Sanskrit verse and its moral, in Hindi and English.
The Panchatantra is the oldest and most travelled collection of animal fables in the world. A king in the south of India had three sons who would not study, and an eighty-year-old teacher named Vishnu Sharma promised to make them wise in six months using nothing but stories. What he wrote became five books — on losing friends, winning friends, crows and owls, losing what you have gained, and acting without thinking — and every story in them hangs on a single verse of practical wisdom.
These pages follow Pandit Jwala Prasad Misra's Sanskrit-and-Hindi edition of 1910, story by story, keeping the verse each fable turns on. Read them in order, or start anywhere.