Hindu stories have ever been the surest means of driving home lofty spiritual and ethical lessons even to minds impervious to serious but beneficial messages. In a deep sense, tales, fables, and parables in Hinduism may be considered magnifying lenses capable of enlarging and clarifying subtle messages embedded in our ancient scriptures.
It is irrelevant to engage in any inquiry regarding the source from which the themes of the tales. In Sri Ramakrishna’s luminous analogy, a wise person would get busy with the eating of luscious mangoes in a garden rather than counting them.
The stories in Hinduism convey such fruitful messages as the glory of the virtue of forgiveness, the greatness of dispassion, the importance of the renunciation of ego, the need for absolute faith, practice of generosity as the key to lasting happiness, boundlessness of divine grace, non-duality of the Divine, the preceptor’s infinite grace, the inscrutability of divine ways, worship of the Lord’s feet, the power of the divine name, freedom from the vice of malice, absence of enmity in God, futility of ritual sans devotion, efficacy of sincere prayers, God’s all-encompassing nature, the reputation of God as the purloiner of pure hearts, a true devotee’s solicitude for God, firmness of faith as a bulwark in crisis, identification with the Self as the infallible means of overcoming psycho-physical pains, Sri Krishna’s skill in stratagem, the virtue of detachment, fickleness of the mind, the need for single-minded concentration, the bane of blind adherence to customs, equal validity of the ways of bhakti and jnana, the need to tell the truth at the right time, absence of self-conceit, music as key to divine bliss, immanence of God, evil of malevolence, the virtue of selflessness, the human body as the tabernacle of God, the need to work and earn, devotional music as the royal road to the attainment of God, power of total surrender to God, the touch of the divine person as a force for salutary metamorphosis, prayer for liberation, the value of a bitter pill, encouragement to the deserving, immutability and immortality of Brahman, redundancy of publicity for purity, and the innate tendency of children to utter even the bitter truth.
Source – page 53 – Prabuddha Bharata magazine February 2018 issue.