The Four Scholars and the Lion's Bones

Four brilliant students, having each mastered a different branch of arcane learning under the same teacher, set out together to prove their scholarship in the wider world. Traveling through a forest, they came upon the scattered bones of a long-dead lion, and decided to test their combined knowledge by attempting to bring the creature back to life, each contributing his own specialty to the feat.

The first assembled the skeleton correctly bone by bone using his knowledge of anatomy. The second covered it with flesh and skin using his mastery of that art. The third prepared to breathe life back into the body using his command of the reviving mantra. A fifth companion traveling with them — not a scholar himself, but a man of plain common sense — begged them to stop, pointing out that a living lion, once revived, would very likely kill them all instantly, and that pure cleverness without any thought for consequence was a dangerous thing indeed.

The three scholars, proud of their learning and eager to prove it worked, dismissed his warning as unlettered timidity and completed the ritual anyway. The lion sprang instantly to life and killed all three scholars where they stood, while the sensible companion, having climbed a nearby tree at the first sign of danger, alone survived to tell what had happened. Knowledge without judgment about when to use it is not wisdom at all — it is simply a more elaborate way of walking directly into disaster.