The Monkey Who Guarded the Garden
Jataka Tales · 1 min read
A gardener, needing to run an errand, left a young monkey in charge of watering a row of newly planted saplings, instructing him carefully to give each one just the right amount of water, no more and no less, since young roots could easily be drowned by excess.
Left alone, the monkey took his task seriously, but decided the gardener's instructions were incomplete. "How can I know the right amount," he reasoned, "without knowing how deep each root truly goes?" He began pulling each sapling gently out of the ground to inspect its roots before deciding how much water it deserved, then replanting it and moving to the next.
By the time the gardener returned, every single sapling in the row had been uprooted and replanted so many times that their fragile roots were damaged beyond recovery, and the entire row wilted and died within days — the monkey's genuine effort to do the job better having ruined it far more completely than simple, faithful obedience to the original instructions ever would have.
Moral of the story
Well-meaning cleverness that ignores simple instructions can do more harm than honest, faithful effort.