A monkey pulls the wedge from a half-split log, and the log shuts on it

In a grove outside a city, a merchant was having a temple built. At noon the foreman and the workers went into the city for lunch, leaving the half-built site empty — and a troop of monkeys came to play over the roof, the woodpile and the logs.

Among the timber lay a huge anjana log a mechanic had begun to split, an acacia wedge driven into its top. One monkey, whose doom the teller says was near, bestrode the log and wondered who had stuck a wedge in such an odd place. With no stake in the site and no idea what the wedge was for, he seized it in both hands and began working it loose — a decision made out of pure curiosity.

The instant the wedge gave, the cleft closed where it had held the log apart, and the log shut on him. The fable leaves the end unspoken. The moral it draws is blunt: meddling should be avoided by the intelligent.

The story is the first tale of the Panchatantra, the Sanskrit collection whose Arabic translation, Kalila wa-Dimna, made it the most influential fable book in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. It survives as a warning about the cost of touching a system you do not understand.