Didactic Literature: Teaching Lessons
Probably every society that has ever existed on Earth has told stories to teach its people how to live and how not to live. Writings like these, which are primarily aimed at teaching or instructing, are called didactic works.
Both the Bible (which contains the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity) and the Koran (the sacred scripture of Islam) include didactic texts written to fulfill the most serious of instructive purposes. They ask and answer profound questions about the meaning of life, what happens after death, how we should worship God, and how we should live our everyday lives.
Other didactic writings are less profound; some of them are immensely practical, even cynical.
Didactic writings make use of a variety of forms. Two of the most popular teaching forms are the anecdote and the parable. (The Parable of the Prodigal Son from the New Testament is in this collection.) A parable is a very brief story that teaches by means of comparison. The teacher telling the parable draws the story’s action from familiar situations: a lost coin, a traveler attacked by thieves, a problem son. The listeners have to infer the comparison the teacher is making. The message is not always easy to understand—parables are told to make us think.
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Taoist teachers in China (see Taoist Anecdotes and the Tao Te Ching) and Sufi masters from Persia (see the Sayings of Saadi) teach by means of anecdotes. Like parables, anecdotes are brief stories that contain familiar characters, settings, and actions that teach a lesson about living. The lesson of the anecdote often has to be inferred by the listener.
Another popular didactic form is the brief, wise saying called the aphorism or maxim. America’s Benjamin Franklin liked to write aphorisms on the value of thrift, hard work, and the simple life. Laotzu, the Chinese philosopher thought to have founded Taoism in the sixth century (see the Tao Te Ching), also used maxims.
The beast fable is a narrative form that teaches its lessons through talking animals. Beast fables appeared in India long ago, well before the sixth century B.C. They were probably collected in the fifth century A.D. or earlier in a story cycle known as the Panchatantra (see “The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal”). Beast fables were later used by Aesop in ancient Greece, by La Fontaine in France, and even by the American humorist James Thurber in the twentieth century (see Connections for “The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal”). Beast fables are still alive and well today: Think, for example, of Disney’s The Lion King.