The Three Questions

Tolstoy wrote “The Three Questions” in 1885 as a short story about a king and a hermit. Jon Muth has transformed it into a children’s book that quietly, without ever announcing it, also imports the Zen sensibility he developed elsewhere in his Stillwater series.

The story is plotted around the questions Nikolai is trying to answer. When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? He asks his friends — Sonya the heron, Gogol the monkey, Pushkin the dog — and gets a different answer from each, each plausible, none quite right. He climbs up the mountain to ask Leo the old turtle. Before Leo can answer, a storm comes, a hurt panda needs help, and Nikolai does the obvious things — pull the panda out of the storm, save its child, get them safe. By morning, Leo asks him whether his questions have been answered, and Nikolai sees that they have, but not in the way he expected.

Muth’s watercolours are at their best here — soft, washy, with a slight melancholy in the palette, like late autumn. The visual storytelling carries real weight. The pages where Nikolai pulls the panda’s child out of the snow are simply paintings; you read them slowly because you can.

This is a less explicit Buddhist book than Muth’s Zen Shorts. Nothing here is labeled as a Zen story; there are no parables and no monk-figures beyond the wise turtle. But the philosophical sensibility is the same: that the right time is now, the right person is the one in front of you, and the right thing is to help. These are answers a child can carry forward into a lifetime of more complicated situations. The book gives them to you without making it homework.

A good first introduction for a young child to the idea that how you act matters more than what theory you act on. Pairs naturally with Zen Shorts for an early-elementary Muth shelf.