The Miserly Farmer

Once a farmer brought a cartload of pears to market. They were so sweet and smelled so good that he expected to sell them for a high price. A Buddhist monk in a ragged cap and a torn robe came up to the cart and asked for one. The farmer shooed him away, but the monk did not leave, and then the farmer lost his temper and started calling him names.

“You have hundreds of pears in your cart,” said the monk. “I am asking for just one. That can hardly do you much harm. Why fly into such a rage over it?”

The people standing around told the farmer to give the monk one of the little pears and send him on his way. But the farmer refused and would not budge. A craftsman had watched the whole quarrel from his workshop, and because the racket annoyed him, he took some money, bought a pear and handed it to the monk.

The monk thanked him and said, “Someone like me, who has given up the world, must not be stingy. I have fine pears of my own, and I invite all of you to share them with me.”

“If you have pears,” somebody asked, “why don’t you eat your own?”

“First I need a seed to plant,” he answered.

With that he ate the pear with great relish. When he had finished, he kept the core in his hand, took the pickaxe from his shoulder and dug a hole a couple of inches deep. He pressed the seed into it and covered it with soil. Then he asked the people in the market for water to pour on it. A couple of curious onlookers fetched hot water from the inn along the street, and the monk watered the seed with it.

Thousands of eyes were fixed on the spot. Already the seed could be seen sprouting. The shoot grew, and in a moment it had become a tree. Branches and leaves burst out of it, it came into blossom, and soon the fruit was ripe: big, sweet-smelling pears hanging from the boughs in heavy bunches. The monk climbed up into the tree and passed the pears down to the crowd, and in no time every pear had been eaten. Then the monk took his pickaxe and chopped down the tree. Crack, crack, it went for a while, and down it came. He hoisted the tree onto his shoulder and strolled off at an easy pace.

When the monk had started his magic, the farmer had pushed into the crowd too. He had stood there craning his neck and goggling, completely forgetting the business he meant to do with his pears. When the monk had gone, he turned around to look at his cart. Every one of his pears was gone. Then he understood that the pears the monk had handed out had been his own.

He looked more closely and saw that the handle of his cart was missing too; it had clearly been chopped off only a short time before. In a fury the farmer ran after the monk as fast as he could go. When he turned the corner, there lay the missing piece of the handle beside the city wall, and he realized that the pear tree the monk had cut down had been his cart handle. But the monk was nowhere to be found, and the whole crowd in the market roared with laughter.

Where this story comes from

“The Miserly Farmer” is chapter XXXIII of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), among the “Tales of Saints and Magicians.”

Martens’s English calls the missing piece the cart’s “axle,” but Wilhelm’s note explains that it is really a handle: the small Chinese carts of his day were one-wheeled pushcarts with two handles, or shafts. That is why the farmer finds a single long piece lying by the city wall, like a felled trunk.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Best for ages 6–8 — a funny magic trick in a busy market that turns one pear into a lesson about sharing.

Reading the story closely

The craftsman and the monk both appear to feed someone, but their generosity has different costs. The craftsman buys a pear with his own money; the monk distributes the farmer’s stock. The final discovery also changes the magic tree into evidence of damage to the cart.

Read the market scene once as a spectator and once as the farmer counting what is missing. Which details look different? The farmer’s insults are unkind, but readers can question whether losing an entire harvest and part of his cart is a fair response. The crowd’s laughter establishes a comic ending, not an unquestionable moral verdict.

Talk about it

• Why does the monk say that someone who has given up the world must not be stingy?
• What is the farmer doing while the magic pear tree grows?
• Whose pears did the crowd really eat? How did you feel when you found out?

Related stories

• The Magic Cask — another short Wilhelm tale of greed punished
• The Two Scholars — the Wilhelm chapter just before this one
• The Kindly Magician — a mysterious wonder-worker who tests a man’s heart