Hofus the Stonecutter
Once upon a time in Japan, there was a poor stone-cutter, named Hofus, who used to go every day to the mountain-side to cut great blocks of stone. He lived near the mountain in a little stone hut, and worked hard and was happy.
One day he took a load of stone to the house of a rich man. There he saw so many beautiful things that when he went back to his mountain he could think of nothing else. Then he began to wish that he too might sleep in a bed as soft as down, with curtains of silk, and tassels of gold…
… Straightway a rock he became. Proudly he stood. The sun could not burn him and the rain could not move him.
“Now, at last,” he said, “no one is mightier than I.”
But one day he was waked from his dreams by a noise,—tap! tap! tap!—down at his feet. He looked and there was a stone-cutter driving his tool into the rock. Another blow and the great rock shivered; a block of stone broke away.
“That man is mightier than I!” cried Hofus, and he sighed:—
“Ah me! Ah me!
If Hofus only the man might be!”
And the voice answered:—
“Be thou thyself!”
In the chinese folklore; Hofus the Stonecutter, the greedy Hofus craves more and more power and goes through a loop of wants for power where he finally realizes that he wants to be himself.
A story about greed and moral, of course, but also a strange loop where Hofus starts out as a stonecutter and ends up like a stonecutter.
