The Monkey and Fish Parable: Intentions vs. Impact
The Monkey and the Fish
“Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree.
In a talk, writer and orator Alan Watts once used the parable of a monkey and a fish to demonstrate the non-universal effectiveness of our intentions.
The parable goes something like this:
A monkey was perched up in a tree on a riverbank. Observing the river, he noticed a fish swimming upstream—which looked like a mighty struggle, with the fish wriggling and straining and making very little progress.
Knowing his own faculties, the monkey saw the fish and determined it was struggling to survive. The monkey breathed air, after all; the creature in the river must have been drowning!
And so, intending to save the fish, the monkey scooped it out of the water and placed it beside himself in the tree.
Monkey’s Misunderstanding
When put into the context of a monkey and a fish, it’s simple to see where well intentions didn’t exactly translate to the greatest benefit. The monkey didn’t have the context to understand that the fish wasn’t struggling, so its own superimposed “help” became the fish’s demise.
What the monkey didn’t realize is that the fish had its own nature. Water is the fish’s “oxygen,” and there are many species that swim upstream despite the challenge. Salmon and steelhead, for instance, brave the currents to spawn.
Often, humans also fall into the same illusory trap of Good Samaritanism. We act with pure intentions and a compassionate desire to help, but we often misguide our efforts when we fail to understand the other’s circumstances.
This is how we sometimes inadvertently impose our own perspectives, just as the monkey did with the fish.
Erroneous Imposition of Ideals
Each of us is uniquely conditioned to learn, behave, and perceive the world based on our interactions with it. Our morals, ideals, opinions, and approaches are all colored by our various social, economic, geographical, and cultural backgrounds.
What is effective for one individual might be completely inappropriate for another. And what works for a single person might not be applicable to a group or the majority.
We tend to have specific ideas about what the “ideal” health, appearance, happiness, prosperity, spirituality, and general existence of a person should be. This tendency to define and impose ideals can manifest in subtle, everyday interactions. Interpersonally, we formulate satisfaction criteria and create expectations, sometimes unfairly demanding compliance when others fail to meet them.
Consider the act of giving a gift, whether tangible (e.g. new gadget) or intangible (e.g. quality time). You might have a clear vision of what you’d like to receive, and believe that sharing your exact preferences will make it easier for someone to “get it right.” But if you insist that someone follows your specifications, then there is a risk of stifling their natural expressions of love and care. This robs the gesture of its authenticity, potentially reducing the personal meaning they intended to convey.
WORLD EXAMPLE: Homelessness
Much like the monkey’s reaction to the fish in the parable, many people see homelessness through the lens of their own experiences and assumptions.
Pity often drives actions that focus on immediate, surface-level problems—such as offering food or clothing—without diving into its deeper systemic and personal challenges.
On a larger scale, communities may enact laws criminalizing homelessness under the guise of “helping” by encouraging people to seek shelter or services. These measures, often rooted in the majority’s discomfort with visible poverty, ignore the scarcity of affordable housing or accessible support systems.
In California, for example, there are three homeless people per shelter bed. It would be impossible to feasibly expect every unhoused person to seek shelter. Yet earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court ruled that cities can punish people sleeping in public places. Removing the right to sleep—a fundamental physiological need—reduces a person’s dignity to seemingly less than none.
Deeper Compassion for the Homeless
Individually, we can offer immediate assistance to the unhoused with material gifts like cash, food, and clothing. These offerings are beneficial, of course, but much like recent policies, they don’t necessarily bring sunshine to a homeless person’s suffering mind-garden.
Unhoused people are both legally transient and made to feel socially transient. As Gregory P. Smith described in his book, Out of the Forest:
“For the most part, to be homeless is to be see-through. […] the vast majority of passersby pretend that the unfortunate soul on the park bench or huddled on the inner-city footpath in front of them simply isn’t there. They’d look right through me as if I was made of glass.”
“In a twisted way,” Gregory wrote, “I sometimes felt a bashing was preferable to being ‘blanked’ by the general public. At least the thugs were engaging with me.”
Being homeless is an altogether isolating, destabilizing, and demoralizing experience. While tossing a few coins into a hat is benevolent, there is an opportunity to have a deeper impact by helping restore an unhoused person’s sense of humanity. Acknowledging someone’s existence fulfills a human need that’s as fundamental as sleep, food, and shelter.
Pity Vs. Compassion
While well-intentioned and related to compassion, pity often involves projecting our own discomfort onto someone else. We might assume what we would want in a similar situation and impose that solution without understanding their needs or preferences.
Implementing our own solutions this way, without consulting the realities of others, is how we sometimes wind up hurting people. Operating only from what we believe is best, or by catering to our own comfort, our “help” is reduced to a mere projection of our own ideals and desires.
As the late yogi Paramhansa Yogananda said:
When a diamond cutter wants to produce a beautiful stone, he knows that he must cut it along its natural cleavage. His cut must not be random, to satisfy some abstract fancy of his own. The same is true for bringing out the beauty in human nature: We must take into account the realities of others, and never seek to impose on them our own.
Wisdom in Action: Balancing Humility and Insight
Understanding the realities of others, as Yogananda suggests, requires a balance of humility and insight—qualities that emerge when we turn inward to examine ourselves. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu prefigured this connection in the Tao Te Ching:
Knowing others is intelligence;
Knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
Mastering yourself is true power.
While we are confined to these human bodies, with their limited perceptive faculties, we cannot know the totality of another’s experience. Even if we conducted extensive, hours-long interviews, we still could not Know their hearts or minds perfectly. Without omnipresent assistance, our knowledge remains fragmented.
Intention has little to do with the actual benefit of an action. From personal to societal and global decisions, we would benefit from being more mindful of our internal positions. With that awareness, it would also behoove us to let people act within their own natures—and still love them all the same.
The Essence of Mindful Compassion
As described with the monkey parable, our best way to help is by understanding. True compassion seeks to understand an individual’s perspective and context, then acts in ways to empower their inherent nature.
Power and wisdom are found within, by mastering ourselves—our assumptions, judgments, and the desire to control outcomes. By dismantling these structures, we free ourselves to act with clarity and genuine care.
The inward journey transforms how we understand our inner worlds and how we engage with others. This applies to our peers and planet-mates, but also to ourselves. For if we peer within, and learn our own nature, then it will only become easier to act upon compassion without bias and leave behind any aims of influence.
Thus, we can offer our presence and support in ways that nurture without uprooting, and uplift without imposing. This is the essence of mindful, monkey-less compassion—and perhaps the most meaningful way to serve our fellow beings.
⋆.ೃ࿔ :･⚝⭑