One of Joseph Campbell’s most poignant illustrations of our problematic situation in the society in which we live is told through the tale of the tiger who is raised by a herd of goats and believes he (or she, if you want) is one of them. When he reaches adolescence a grown tiger attacks the herd. The goats all flee, but our tiger remains. He discovers he is a tiger, begins to act like one. This is the basic backbone of the plot.
What I’d like to find out is where this story really comes from. I have searched, but with nothing more to go on than the story itself. Since it has no official name I haven’t managed to find any reference to it other than from Campbell’s retelling.
Campbell points out that this is a parallel of another tale, that of the king’s son who is put out and grows up thinking he is merely a hunter. When the king dies they send for him and tell him he is the king’s son. He is rajaputra vat (like the king’s son). The story obviously originates in India somewhere, but I cannot be more specific.
Does anyone know this story, where it came from, what source material it exists in?
The fable of the “Grass-Eating Tiger” is found in the Tales and Parables of Ramakrishna, a 19th-century Indian mystic (the Ramakrishna Mission guy). I don’t know whether Ramakrishna made it up or derived it from traditional Bengali folklore.
Wow, such a swift reply! Thank you for this.
I too suspect that Sri Ramakrishna probably did not invent this story (it is different from the version Campbell had read), but was retelling an older tale. I now have more information to go on, however.
Are you saying that tigers are obligate carnivores? I think that may be true. So the fairy tale is a lie! Only an immoral could be learned from this story.
By some Indian standards the tale is slightly shocking, as it’s using fierce carnivory as a metaphor for the way one is supposed to behave to follow the true Self. In the context of typical Hindu devotional teachings, on the other hand, “tigerish” behavior is popularly supposed to stand for betrayal of the true Self in humans, by giving way to violence or lust or greed. For instance, acts of violence or stealing a horse are said to cause one to be reborn as a tiger in the next life.
In Ramakrishna’s parable, on the other hand, unthinking submission to greed and sensuality is represented by the behavior of the goats. The tiger cub is just going along with what everybody around him does; it’s not till he recognizes that the actions he’s always perceived as horrible and frightening are really the right thing for him that he has the key to his real identity.
Of course, Ramakrishna isn’t trying to say that humans are supposed to literally be predator-carnivores like tigers. (He did at one point practice some tantrika transcendence rituals involving meat-eating, but AFAICT he thought such practices should be viewed with caution and mostly avoided.) The “moral” of his parable is more general: you shouldn’t just go along with the herd and assume that what everybody does is the right thing to do. You have to follow who you really are even if it can seem alien and repulsive at first.
IANA Ramakrishna scholar, but that’s my take on the tale for what it’s worth.
^^^^
Indeed that seems to me to capture the essence of the story as it was told by Campbell (he makes it rather more obvious). Of course, it has an Oriental inflection – that of the guru – which is absent in Western myth, where the individual must always find his own path, albeit with some aid, without following in the footsteps of a master, guru, father, etc. But this fable is still compatible with that view – you just have to imagine the tiger going to the pool of still water by himself and realising on his own that he is not a goat; from there… who knows? instinct kicks in I guess.