Fifteen gentle old tales from the Zen, Taoist and Buddhist story-worlds of Japan, China and Tibet, told in a soft Scottish voice. A young poet climbs to a hillside of cherry trees at dusk and waits for a poem while the temple bell fades; an old woodcutter follows a sparrow into the bamboo; a parrot carries rice home to its parents; a wandering monk grows a whole pear tree in a market square; a golden deer steps forward in another's place; and a king on a misty mountain learns that what he was clutching was never his to keep. Each story is a little slower, and a little simpler, than the one before, until the last few are hardly stories at all: one tree seen in four seasons, an ox who asks only for kind words, the wind and the clouds and the snow each finding their own work, and a scholar who dreams a whole life away in an ant kingdom under a single afternoon's tree.
The stories
- 2:00 A Cherry-Flower Idyll 12 min
- 14:59 The Sparrow's Small Basket 13 min
- 28:55 The Parrot Who Carried Rice Home 12 min
- 42:08 The Lemon Tree and the Pomelo 13 min
- 55:48 The Pear Tree That Grew in a Morning 13 min
- 1:10:01 The Golden Deer of the Banyan Grove 12 min
- 1:22:36 The Mountain Trees and the Two Geese 11 min
- 1:34:52 The Hare Who Heard the Sky Fall 12 min
- 1:47:45 The Woodpecker, the Tortoise, and the Deer 14 min
- 2:02:41 The Eight Old Men of Bagong Mountain 12 min
- 2:15:34 The Purple-Bud Tree at the Edge of the Clearing 14 min
- 2:30:47 The Ox Who Won the Forfeit 15 min
- 2:46:16 The Evergreen and the Sky-Full-of-Stars 12 min
- 2:59:28 The Wind, the Clouds, and the Snow 11 min
- 3:11:31 The Dream Beneath the Huai Tree 14 min
Retold from
- Chinese Fables and Folk Stories, by Mary Hayes Davis and Chow-Leung
- Chuang Tzu, translated by Herbert A. Giles
- Eastern Stories and Legends, by Marie L. Shedlock
- Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki
- Jataka Tales, by Ellen C. Babbitt
- More Jataka Tales, by Ellen C. Babbitt
- Romances of Old Japan, translated by Yei Theodora Ozaki
- The Chinese Fairy Book, edited by Richard Wilhelm