It happened once upon a time that Mullah Nasruddin was trying to chop a branch off a tree, but he was going about it in an unusual way – he was sitting on the branch, and chopping at it between himself and the tree-trunk.

A man passing by below saw what he was doing, and called to him, “Mullah, if you do it that way, you’re going to fall out of the tree!”

Nasruddin paid no attention, kept chopping at the branch, and suddenly, with a loud crack, came crashing down to the ground.

Battered but alive, Nasruddin pulled himself to his feet and went running after the man. “You must have psychic powers!” he exclaimed. “You knew I was going to fall!”

The man tried to explain, but the Mullah wouldn’t listen. “Tell me then – you knew about the fall – when am I going to die?”

The man wanted to get away from Nasruddin, but the Mullah was persistent, and finally the man said, “Okay, then, listen – when your donkey brays three times while he is carrying a load of hay uphill, that will be the moment that you die.”

Some days later, this precise event happened – Nasruddin’s donkey brayed three times while carrying hay up a hill, whereupon the Mullah looked heavenward, said, “Ah! Then I am dead now!” and lay down on the ground.

After a while, somebody found him and carried him home, where they dressed him in clean clothes, said some prayers and put him in a casket to carry him to the cemetery.

On the way, though, the men carrying the casket came to a fork in the road, and fell into an argument about which way was the shortest route to the cemetery. Putting the casket down, they held an interminable discussion about which road to take.

Finally, Nasruddin sat up in the casket and said, “Listen – when I was alive, it was THAT way.”