The brahmin's dream
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
The original castle in the air — this story is where a great many languages got the phrase.
A poor brahmin named Svabhavakripana was given a pot of rice gruel as alms. It was more food than he usually saw at once, and he hung the pot on a nail above his bed and lay down beneath it to look at it.
And he began to think.
"There's a famine coming. If there's a famine, this pot will be worth a hundred rupees. With a hundred rupees I could buy a pair of goats. Goats give birth every six months, so soon I'd have a herd. I'd sell the goats and buy cows. I'd sell the calves and buy buffaloes. Buffaloes and then horses, and when the horses foal I'll be a wealthy man.
"With that wealth I'd build a house — brick, four rooms — and a rich brahmin will see it and give me his daughter, and she'll be beautiful, and we'll have a son. I'll call him Somasharma.
"And when he's old enough to crawl I'll sit with a book in the stable, and he'll come crawling over towards the horses, and I'll shout to my wife — take the child! — and she'll be busy with the cooking and won't hear me. So I'll get up and I'll kick her — like this —"
And he kicked.
And his foot hit the pot on the nail, and the pot came down, and the gruel went over the bed, the floor and the brahmin.
It's not a story against ambition — it's about how far in front of yourself you can get while nothing has actually happened yet. He goes from one pot of rice to kicking an imaginary wife without noticing the transition, which is exactly how it works. The kick is what makes it perfect: he's undone by acting out a scene that doesn't exist.
Sometimes he's a potter with a pot of flour; there's a near-identical tale in the Arabian Nights, in Aesop, and in the Grimms. English got "don't count your chickens" from the same family of stories, and "building castles in the air" is often traced to this one.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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