Translating Vishnu Native Intuition and the Construction of Meaning in Rāmāyan 3392 AD and Krishna: A Journey Within: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

In the first episode of King of the Hill (season 3), one of the characters, named Kahn, delivers a eulogy in the form of a short Buddhist narrative about a man being chased by a tiger. The man was forced to leap off a cliff only to catch himself on a bush whose roots would inevitably break free from the rocks sending him plummeting to his death. There, caught between these two vehicles
of inevitable death—the tiger and the cliff—he saw a strawberry. The man ate the fruit and he found it to be the sweetest fruit that he had ever tasted. The allegorical meaning of the tale was completely lost on the funeral attendees, leaving the show’s protagonist Hank to comment, “Can you believe this guy. He tells a joke at a funeral.”