The story is about a king whose
judgement and wisdom are put to the test – he is given the grim task
of finding the corpse of a hanged man on its execution ground and
bring it into the magic circle of a sorcerer. Along the way, the
corpse tells him a story, at the end of which the king has to answer
a question. The rights and wrongs in the story are so tangled, the
opposing sides of the argument so closely matched, that – if the
king truly understands the complexity of situation – he will not
be able to call it. The only way he can possibly come up with an
answer is by deferring to custom, tradition, and borrowed “wisdom”.
This is exactly what he does and, as soon as he answers the riddle, the corpse
flies off his shoulder, back to the tree where it had been hanged.
There are twenty-four riddles in all.
Twenty-three times the king is confident he has the answer, and
twenty-three times the corpse returns to its tree. Until finally the
king is presented with a riddle he cannot solve. As he goes on
puzzling over it in silence, the corpse is finally satisfied that the
king has reached the point of wisdom. Not only that the king is then able to complete his task, but he is also given the all-important
knowledge that will enable him to defeat the evil sorcerer and become
a truly great king.
The morale of this story appears to be
that the king is wiser in his silence than in his replies. That admitting ignorance is better than giving simplistic answers based on prejudice.
Being realistic about the limitations
of human knowledge safeguards our ability to better that knowledge.
Every scientific theory is valid till proven wrong. Staying open to
factual evidence and being ready to reconsider ideas that we have
once held as truths is where the strength of science lays. Resilience
through flexibility: the fact that bricks are replaceable makes the
edifice as a whole long-lasting and stronger.
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