the man tiger and the spirit story
Answers
Answer:
This is a tribal story from Nagaland. This story highlights the close relationship between man, god and religion. Nagas revere tigers and leopards a lot and ultimately trace the ancestry of their own culture to a single man and a single tiger[1].
There are two versions of the story. The first[2][3] is the less popular one and the second one is more or less similar between various Naga tribes. The first version goes as follows:
As the story goes, three brothers - a Man, a Cosmic spirit and a Tiger - once lived in a village. The Spirit was gifted with divine powers, Man was gifted with intelligence and the Tiger was gifted with strength and agility. After their mother died, the three brothers began fighting among each other for their mother's worldly belonging. The Spirit was the eldest, so he decided to step back like a big brother and let his two younger siblings have his mother's possessions. However, Man and Tiger could not settle on who between the two would be the one.
So they decided to have a race. They set up a bamboo pole far away and decided that whoever succeeds in reaching the pole first would stay in the village and the loser would go live in the forest. They started the race, but Man was cunning. He made a bow and arrow and knocked out the bamboo pole with a shot from far away. When Tiger reached the destination (before Man), he saw the fallen pole and thinking that Man had already won the race, he went to live in the forest.
However, Spirit knew what really had happened and was extremely angry at man. Using his divine powers, he took away Man's eyes and replaced them with goat's eyes so that Man could never again see the Spirit. Then, Spirit departed.