Borzuy brings Kalileh and Demneh from India

Borzuy is a physician at Anushirvan's court, old, eloquent, and versed in every branch of learning. One day he tells the king what he has read in an Indian book. On the mountains of Hind grows a herb, fine as the silk of Rum, which a skilled man can gather and blend; scattered on a corpse, it makes the dead speak. He asks leave to go and find it. "It cannot be," says the king, "but it should be put to the test."

Anushirvan sends him to the Raja of Hind with a letter and three hundred camel-loads of gifts. The Raja welcomes him, puts his own physicians at his service, and Borzuy walks the mountains on foot with them. He gathers herbs dry and fresh, withered and blooming, and sprinkles every mixture on the dead. Not one corpse stirs. Ashamed before the king and the court, he curses the ignorant man who wrote such a thing down.

Then he asks the Indian sages whether anyone is wiser than they are. They take him to a very old man, who has read the same words and searched in the same way. The herb, the sage tells him, is the man of learning, and the mountain is knowledge, always high above the crowd. The corpse is the man without knowledge, for it is knowledge that makes men live. The herb Borzuy is looking for is a book called Kalileh, and it lies in the Raja's treasury.

The Raja is troubled by the request. No one has ever asked for this book, he says, but he will refuse Anushirvan nothing, as long as Borzuy reads it only in his presence, so that no one can say it was copied. Borzuy reads a chapter at a time and learns it by heart, and each time he writes to his king he secretly writes out a chapter. So the book reaches Iran. When Anushirvan writes back that "the sea of knowledge has reached us", Borzuy takes his leave, loaded with Indian gifts.

"Kalileh has brought my soul to life," Anushirvan tells him, and hands him the key to the treasury. Borzuy takes nothing but a royal robe. He asks only one more thing: that when Bozorgmehr writes out the book, its first chapter should tell of Borzuy, so that his labour is not forgotten after his death. The king agrees, and Bozorgmehr writes it.

Ferdowsi then follows the book's later life. It was kept in the royal treasury in Pahlavi; in the time of the caliph al-Ma'mun it was put into Arabic; and when Nasr ruled, his minister Abu'l-Fazl had it put into Persian, and interpreters read it aloud to the poet Rudaki, who set it in verse. The poem calls the book only Kalileh. Persian readers know it as Kalileh and Demneh, after the two jackals of its first story, and its fables go back to the Sanskrit Panchatantra.