The Mighty Fish

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as a mighty fish of enormous size; the fish’s parents; the crews of ships crossing the ocean.
• Setting: The open sea off the coast of India, in one of the Bodhisatta’s animal births as recounted in the Jataka collection.
• The turn: The great fish, playing in the water, leaps high into the air and crashes back down, generating waves that threaten to destroy a fleet of ships and drown hundreds of sailors.
• The outcome: The fish recognizes the danger of heedless action and resolves never again to use his great strength carelessly, saving the sailors from destruction.
• The legacy: The tale became a teaching on the restraint of power - that strength without mindfulness is a form of violence, and that the strong bear responsibility for harm they cause even without malice.

The sea was calm the morning the fish was born. His mother, herself the size of a small boat, labored in the deep current between two underwater ridges, and the calf that emerged from her was already longer than she was. His father circled once, inspecting, then swam away. That was the nature of fish. But this was no ordinary fish. By the time a season had passed, the Bodhisatta - for this was one of his animal births - stretched a full league from nose to tail, and the water darkened wherever he passed beneath the surface.

He grew further. His scales were the color of hammered copper, each one broad as a man’s chest. His eyes were the size of temple offering bowls. When he breathed, the current shifted. When he turned, the sand on the ocean floor rolled like grain on a threshing floor. He ate the weeds and small things that drifted through the deep water, harming nothing larger than what he needed, and he was content. He did not know yet what his body could do.

The Leap

One afternoon the great fish rose from the deep shelf where he rested and felt the warmth of shallower water on his back. Sunlight came down in columns. Small fish scattered as his shadow passed over them like a cloud crossing a field. He was in a playful mood - the water was warm, the current easy, and his muscles had been still for too long.

He gathered himself. His tail drove down, then up. The whole length of him - a league of copper-scaled muscle - surged upward through the water column and broke the surface.

He rose into the air.

From the deck of the nearest merchant ship, a sailor looked up and saw the sky go dark. A shape hung above the ocean, longer than any vessel in the fleet, turning slowly, water streaming from its flanks in white ribbons. For a held breath it was beautiful. Then it fell.

The fish struck the water and the sea cracked open. A wave rose from the point of impact - a wall of water taller than the mast of the largest ship. It rolled outward in every direction. The first ship it hit tilted sideways, threw half its crew into the water, and nearly capsized before righting itself. The second ship was swamped. Cargo broke loose. Men clung to ropes and screamed. The third and fourth ships, farther out, rode the swell but lost their rudders. Across the fleet, five hundred men saw death rushing toward them as green water.

The Cries

The great fish had sunk back into the deep by the time the sound reached him. But sound carries differently underwater. He heard the hulls groaning, the dull percussion of wood striking wood, the high strange noise of human voices filtered through the surface. He had heard these sounds before - ships passed over him regularly, and he paid them no mind - but never like this. Never this many at once, and never with that particular quality in the voices.

He rose again, slowly this time, and let his great eye break the surface just enough to see.

The fleet was scattered. One vessel was sinking, its belly split by the force of the wave. Men clung to planks and barrels. Others hauled the drowning aboard ships that were themselves damaged, taking on water through cracked seams. A man on the nearest deck was holding a boy who could not have been older than ten, both of them drenched and shaking.

The fish understood. He had done this. Not from malice, not from hunger, not from any intention at all - just from leaping because his body wanted to leap. His size, which he had never chosen, had made his play into a catastrophe.

The Stillness

He sank. Down through the warm layer, down through the cold, down to the sand shelf where the light barely reached. He lay there. His great body, which minutes before had felt like joy, now felt like a weapon he could not put down.

He thought about it clearly, the way the Bodhisatta always thought - even in animal form, even when his mind was a fish’s mind and his instincts were a fish’s instincts. He had done no wrong by intention. But the men on those ships were drowning, and their drowning was caused by him. If he had been smaller, his leap would have made a splash and nothing more. But he was not smaller. He was a league long, and the ocean moved when he moved.

The responsibility was his. Not because he had wished harm, but because he had the power to cause it and had not considered the consequence.

He made a vow there on the ocean floor. He would not leap again. He would not thrash. He would not play near the surface where ships traveled. When he moved, he would move slowly, and when he rose, he would rise with care, so that his great body displaced the water gently, the way a man lowers himself into a bathing pool rather than jumping in.

The Restraint

For the rest of his life in that body, the great fish kept the vow. He swam in the deepest channels. When he felt the urge to leap - and the urge came often, because his muscles were vast and the water was warm and the surface glittered above him - he let the urge pass through him without acting on it. He breathed. He waited. The impulse faded. He moved on.

Ships passed above him by the hundreds over the years that followed. Their shadows crossed his back like birds crossing a field. None of their crews ever knew what swam beneath them - this enormous copper-colored being, longer than their vessel, who had chosen stillness over strength because he had seen what his strength could do.

He ate the weeds and the small drifting things. He harmed nothing. When storms came and the ocean heaved, he dove deeper, so that even the involuntary motion of his body in rough water would not add to the violence of the waves.

He lived a long time in that form. When he died, it was in the deep, and the current carried his body down to where no ship would ever reach it.

What the Buddha Said

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana, to a monk who had been careless with his strength - a large man, formerly a wrestler, who had knocked a younger monk down during walking meditation without meaning to, and who had said afterward that he had not intended harm.

The Buddha said: intention is not enough. The strong must account for their strength. A large body in motion displaces what is around it whether the mind wills it or not. Mindfulness is not only awareness of thought. It is awareness of weight, of force, of the space your actions fill in the world.

He identified himself as the great fish. The monk who had been knocked down, he said, had been one of the sailors.

The wrestler monk bowed his head and did not speak for a long time. When he rose, he walked more carefully.