Vietnamese children were told that on certain nights, if they looked at the moon, they could see the lone image of Cuoi, seated at the foot of a banyan tree. Sometimes, he would even turn his head to look at them and smile. The story of his ascension to the moon is quite interesting and is being passed on from generations to generations.
"Once upon a time, there was a little boy of a very poor family. He was able to work as a buffalo boy, taking care of water buffaloes in the rice fields for a rich farmer, in exchange for food and shelter. One day, while gathering wood in the forest, he came upon a tiger cub, picked it up and wanted to play with the cub, when the mother tigress came growling. Terrified, he threw the cub to the ground and climbed up a tree to hide. He did it with such force that he killed the cub. When the mother tigress saw that her cub was dead, she went to a certain banyan tree,
gathered some leaves, chewed them and applied the pulp to the head of her dead cub. Cuoi could not believe what he saw. The little tiger jumped to its feet, frolicking in the sun, as if nothing had happened. When the tigress and her baby disappeared, quickly he got down from his shelter, ran to the miraculous banyan tree and gathered some leaves and took them home with him.
On his way home , he saw a dead dog. Eager to try what he had seen , he chewed some leaves and applied the pulp to the dog's head. Immediately the dog came to life and barked at him, waving its tail.
Cuoi understood that the leaves of the banyan tree had this miraculous power to restore life to the dead. So, he returned to the same place the next day, uprooted the tree, dragged it to the farmer's home and planted it in the yard.
The farmer's wife was quite curious and demanded to know what Cuoi was doing. He did not want to tell her about the miraculous property of his find, but simply asked her not to put dirty kitchen wastes at the foot of his tree. "The tree will fly away to the moon, he answered her, half jokingly.
The farmer's wife, not satisfied with Cuoi's answer, decided to find out and so, day after day, dumped rubbish at the foot of the tree. One day, to her surprise, the tree slowly moved and began to fly up into the sky.
from http://www.suite101.com
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