Book excerpt: In this book Mahesh Prabhu presents Vedic stories in their core essence, relaying and focusing their deeper meaning, not interfering with it or reducing it to alien and superficial concepts. His stories are short, poignant, and diverse, with multiple levels of meaning, like parables, conundrums, paradoxes and axioms (sutras). He has drawn these stories from many traditional sources in Sanskrit literature and reworked them in a concise and invocative manner. They feature the names and stories of famous sages, kings, places and the peoples of old India. Such exalted figures as King Bhartrihari or the Vedantic sage Ashtavakra visit these pages and come to life again through them.