Humour is not a strong point of ancient Indian philosophers, or philosophers in general. Besides some sharp repartees, ingenious ironies and downright abuses, humour proper is seldom to be met with in philosophical works. One notable exception is the parable of the wolf's footprint. In what follows I propose to discuss the parable in some detail. The parable most probably originated with the Cārvāka-s and was quite well known in the Jain, Buddhist and Brahminical circles.

The first allusion to the parable occurs in the MBh, Śāntiparvan, Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya. Bhīṣma tells Yudhiṣṭhira that the acquisition of righteousness (dharma) and wealth is the direct object of a Kṣatriya (one born in the warrior caste) and one should not get involved in deciding what is righteousness and what is not, for no one has seen their results. So it is as useless as the discussion about the wolf's footprint:

Nīlakaṇṭha in his commentary left the word, vṛkapadaṃ, unexplained, presumably because he did not know the parable behind the simile. He wrote, “As the judgment regarding the footprint on the ground —whether it belongs to a wolf or a dog or a leopard— is futile, so is the judgment whether something contributes to righteousness or to its opposite.”

An earlier scribe fared no better. Baffled by the word, vṛkapadaṃ, he ‘emended’ it to read vṛkṣaphalaṃ, ‘fruit of a tree’.