The Talkative Tortoise

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, reborn as a spirit dwelling in a tree near a lake; a tortoise who cannot stop talking; two wild geese who befriend the tortoise and devise a plan to carry him through the air.
• Setting: A lake in the wilderness near Benares, in the Jataka tradition of the Pali canon.
• The turn: The geese agree to carry the tortoise to their mountain home by means of a stick held between their beaks, but only if the tortoise can keep his mouth shut for the entire flight.
• The outcome: The tortoise, unable to resist answering the taunts of villagers below, opens his mouth, releases the stick, and falls to his death in the king’s courtyard.
• The legacy: The Buddha told this story at Jetavana monastery, identifying himself as the tree-spirit and the talkative tortoise as a monk named Kokalika, whose compulsive speech had already brought him trouble in that present life.

Two wild geese used to visit the same lake, year after year, where a tortoise lived in the shallows. Over time - how much time is not recorded, but enough for trust to grow between creatures who had no natural business being friends - the three of them became companions. The geese would land on the bank and the tortoise would haul himself out of the mud, and they would talk. The geese talked about mountains. The tortoise talked about everything.

He talked about the water level. He talked about the quality of the weeds. He talked about a crane he had seen the previous week and what he thought of the crane’s fishing technique and what the crane had said to a frog and what the frog had said back. The geese listened. They were patient animals.

The Lake Dries

One season the rains did not come. The lake shrank. What had been a broad sheet of green water pulled back to a circle of mud with a puddle at its center, and the tortoise sat in that puddle and worried aloud. He worried to the geese. He worried to the herons. He worried to a water-snake who did not care. The geese, who had mountains to return to and lakes that never dried, said a simple thing.

“Come with us.”

The tortoise looked at them. He had four short legs and a shell. They had wings. He said as much.

“We have thought about it,” the geese said. “We will find a strong stick. We will each grip one end in our beaks. You will bite the middle. We will fly, and you will hang between us, and we will carry you to our lake in the mountains. It is a good lake. It is deep. But there is one condition.”

The tortoise waited, which was unusual for him.

“You must not open your mouth. Not once. Not for any reason. If you open your mouth, you will let go of the stick, and you will fall, and you will die.”

The tortoise said he understood. He said it several times.

The Stick

They found a good stick - dry wood, solid, the right length. The geese tested it between their beaks. The tortoise bit down on the center and held. He held hard. His jaw was strong from years of crunching pond-weed and the occasional snail, and the stick did not slip.

The tree-spirit who lived near the lake watched this. He had watched the friendship form. He had watched the tortoise talk through every afternoon for seasons. He said nothing to the geese, because what could he say that they did not already know? They knew the tortoise. They were gambling on his will against his nature.

The geese lifted. Their wings beat, and the tortoise’s weight dragged for a moment, and then the air took them. The three of them rose over the lake, over the trees, over the dried fields. The tortoise hung between his friends with his mouth clamped on the stick, and below him the whole country opened up - the roads, the villages, the brown rivers. He had never seen it. He had never seen anything from higher than the surface of his own lake.

He wanted to say something about it.

He did not. Not yet.

Over the Village

They passed over a village on the outskirts of Benares. Children in the street looked up and saw two geese carrying something between them on a stick. They pointed. They shouted.

“Look! Look at the geese! They are carrying a tortoise! The tortoise is hanging from a stick!”

The adults came out. They laughed. A man called up, “Where are they taking you, friend? Did you lose a bet?” A woman shouted, “Drop him in my cooking pot!” The village roared.

The tortoise heard every word. He heard the laughter. He felt something hot rise in his chest - a pressure behind his jaws, a need so physical it was almost pain. He wanted to answer. He wanted to tell them that he was going to the mountains and that his friends were carrying him and that the view was extraordinary and that they were fools standing in the dust while he was flying.

The geese felt the stick twitch. They could not speak - their beaks were full - but they flew faster.

It was not fast enough.

The tortoise opened his mouth.

“Mind your own business, you -”

The stick dropped away from his jaws. The sky tilted. The tortoise fell, spinning, his legs clawing at nothing, his mouth still open, still forming the words of a retort that no one on the ground would hear clearly. He struck the courtyard of the king’s palace and broke apart on the stones.

The King’s Courtyard

The king’s ministers found the tortoise in the courtyard and brought the remains to the king, who could not understand how a tortoise had fallen out of the sky. The tree-spirit, who had watched the whole flight from his vantage in the branches, knew. The geese, circling back, knew. They did not land. There was nothing to land for.

The tortoise had been warned. He had understood the warning. He had agreed to the condition. He had even, for a time, kept his mouth shut. But the habit of speech was deeper in him than the fear of falling. When the voices came up from below, he could no more stay silent than he could fly on his own.

At Jetavana

The Buddha told this story at the Jetavana monastery near Savatthi. A monk named Kokalika had been warned, repeatedly, by his fellow monks about his uncontrolled speech. He talked constantly. He talked about others. He talked about himself. He talked when silence was called for and kept talking when silence was begged for. The monks brought the matter to the Buddha.

The Buddha said he had known this man before.

“In a past life,” he said, “I was the spirit in a tree near a lake. This monk was a tortoise who lived in that lake. He had two friends, two geese, who loved him well enough to carry him through the sky. They asked one thing of him. He could not give it.”

He looked at Kokalika.

“He died then because he could not close his mouth. He will come to grief again, for the same reason.”

Kokalika said nothing. For a moment. Then he opened his mouth to object, and the monks near him looked away, because they had heard the story and understood what they were watching.