Fables as Quiet Teachers: Listening to the Stories of Spiritual Traditions
It is an old impulse—the urge to press truth into words poised just out of reach. Fables have slipped into spiritual traditions like evening mist, teaching through story, withholding the lesson just enough for the heart to discover its own longing.
Where Stories Begin and End
A fable enters not as a command, but as an invitation. You hear the tale. Maybe you know the parable of the burning house—children inside while flames take the walls, asked to leave, but only coming at the hope of new toys, not the warning of fire. No moral is laid out. Only the echo remains: what would make you leave? What do you hear in the warnings you ignore?
Other stories move similarly—partial, unresolved. There is the story of the blind men and elephant, where each person touches a different part and believes it to be the whole—truth tasted in fragments, never all at once.
Two Wolves, One Mind
Another fable circles, quieter. An old person tells a child: within you, two wolves are always fighting. One is anger and fear; the other is love and calm. The child asks, 'Which wolf wins?' The reply, 'The one you feed.' The story stops. It does not tell you what to do—only what to notice: today, which wolf?
A story can reflect the shape of the ego: a character chasing, grasping, avoiding, entwined in self. Some find resonance in a parable about the ego, where the self wrestles and lets go, unsure of where it lands.
Teaching Through Story: The Circle Grows
Spiritual traditions lean into story because stories linger. One person hears the lesson as faith, another as doubt. Around the fire, in quiet halls, each retelling changes; the core remains, quietly asking—can you hold a story in your hands and let it breathe? Can you listen without solving?
Some teachings—like Zen koans meaning—insist on questions with no answer, or answers that dissolve on the tongue. The story becomes a moment where silence and bewilderment teach what words cannot.
- The parable of the burning house—urgency hidden inside hope
- The two wolves—an old question, always new
- A story you remember from childhood—what does it ask now?
Stories linger in fragments— a phrase here, a gesture there. You may find yourself remembering wisdom from spiritual teachers later, or perhaps a spiritual story with meaning that once passed quietly through your day.
Pause in what feels like repetition. The same fable—told a hundred times—offers a hundred kinds of truth. Sometimes transmission of truth happens without the speaker or the listener noticing— it flickers, then enters in its own time.
Or perhaps while standing by a window, a phrase remembered—
A story is a vessel. It carries something, even as it lets it spill away. When the words dissolve, perhaps only an essence remains—small as breath, quiet as dusk. Sometimes, that is enough.
Now pause. Let one old story pass through you, quiet as fog. Let it take the form of your own longing. No answer is needed. Only attention.