The Timid Hare

At a Glance

• Central figures: A timid hare (the Bodhisatta in a past life), a lion who serves as king of the beasts, and a host of panicked animals who flee without knowing what they flee from.
• Setting: A forest near the Western Ocean in ancient India; a Jataka tale from the Pali canonical collection.
• The turn: A ripe bel-fruit drops behind a sleeping hare, and the hare, without looking back, decides the earth is breaking up and runs.
• The outcome: The lion intercepts the stampede, traces the panic to its source, and leads the animals back to the bel tree, where they find the fallen fruit and nothing more.
• The legacy: The tale became one of the most widely told Jataka parables on the danger of baseless fear, retold across Theravada Buddhist cultures and preserved in the Pali Daddabha Jataka.

A bel-fruit fell. That was all. It dropped from its stem and struck a palm leaf on its way down, and the sound it made when it hit the ground was a hard, hollow crack - like something giving way beneath the surface of the world. The hare sleeping under the bel tree did not see it fall. He only heard it.

He was already running before his eyes were fully open.

The Hare Under the Bel Tree

The hare had been lying in the shade, curled at the base of the tree with his nose tucked under his forepaw. He was the nervous kind. He spent his days thinking about what might go wrong - floods, fires, drought, the possibility that the earth itself might one day collapse. He had no particular reason for this last fear. It simply lived in him the way hunger or thirst did, unexamined and always present.

When the bel-fruit struck the ground behind him, his body answered before his mind could form a question. The earth is breaking up, he thought. He did not turn around. He did not sniff the air or flatten his ears to listen. He bolted through the underbrush, legs pumping, eyes wide, and the forest blurred past him in streaks of green and brown.

Another hare saw him running and called out.

What is it? What has happened?

The earth is breaking up! the first hare screamed without slowing.

The second hare ran. A third hare saw two hares running and joined them. Then a fourth. Then a hundred. The hundred hares poured out of the thickets like water through a broken dam, and by the time they reached the tree line they had gathered deer.

The Stampede

The deer asked no questions either. They saw a hundred hares running as if death were behind them, and they ran. Then the boars ran. Then the elk. Then the buffaloes, the wild oxen, the rhinoceroses, the tigers, the bears, the leopards - each species catching the terror from the one before it, the way dry grass catches flame. An elephant herd joined, and with the elephants the ground itself began to shake, which only confirmed what everyone already believed.

The earth is breaking up! passed from mouth to mouth, species to species, and nobody asked who had said it first. The forest emptied. Animals that had never met ran shoulder to shoulder. Animals that ate each other ran side by side without a glance. The fear was larger than any of them, and it carried them all toward the Western Ocean, where the cliffs dropped into deep water. They were running, without knowing it, toward the edge.

The Lion on the Ridge

The Bodhisatta in that life was a lion. He lived on a ridge above the forest, and he heard the stampede before he saw it - a sound like distant thunder that did not stop. He came down the slope and stood on a rock ledge that jutted out above the path the animals were taking. Below him the river of bodies surged past: hares, deer, boars, elephants, all tangled together, all moving in one direction.

He saw where the path led. He saw the cliffs.

He roared. Not a hunting roar - a command. Three times he roared, and his voice cut through the thunder of hooves and feet and the shrieking of birds overhead. The sound of it stopped the animals closest to him, and the ones behind piled into the ones in front, and the whole stampede lurched to a halt, animals stumbling and heaving and panting in a great shuddering mass.

Why are you running? the lion said.

The elephants said the tigers had told them. The tigers said the rhinoceroses had told them. The rhinoceroses said the buffaloes. The buffaloes said the elk. The elk said the boars. The boars said the deer. The deer said the hares. And the hares - all hundred of them - pointed to the first hare, the one who had been sleeping under the bel tree.

The Hare’s Testimony

The lion came down from the ledge and stood before the hare. The hare was trembling so hard his whole body shook, and his eyes were white-rimmed.

You said the earth is breaking up. What did you see?

I did not see it, the hare said. I heard it. I was lying under the bel tree and I heard the earth crack open behind me.

Did you look?

The hare did not answer. He had not looked.

Show me this tree, the lion said.

The hare did not want to go back. He was certain that the place where the bel tree stood was now a pit, a hole in the world, a rupture that would swallow him. But the lion stood over him, calm and enormous, and something in the lion’s stillness made the hare’s terror feel small enough to carry. They went back together. The lion told the other animals to wait.

The Bel-Fruit

They found the tree standing where it had always stood. The ground beneath it was solid. The shade was undisturbed. And there, half-buried in the fallen leaves at the base of the trunk, lay a single ripe bel-fruit - yellow-green, hard-shelled, about the size of a fist. It had struck a dry palm leaf on its way down. The palm leaf still lay beside it, cracked in two from the impact.

The lion nosed the fruit. He looked at the hare.

The hare stared at the bel-fruit for a long time. He did not speak. There was nothing to say. The earth had not broken. Nothing had cracked open. A fruit had fallen from a tree the way fruits do, and he had nearly led every living creature in the forest over a cliff into the sea.

The lion brought the hare back to the waiting animals. He told them what they had found. Slowly, one species at a time, the animals turned and walked back into the forest. The elephants went last, their great feet leaving craters in the mud of the path. By nightfall the forest was as it had been - full of animals going about their ordinary living, eating, drinking, sleeping in their ordinary places.

The hare went back to his spot under the bel tree. He lay down. Above him, more bel-fruits hung on their stems, heavy and ripe, waiting to fall. He looked up at them for a while. Then he put his nose under his forepaw and slept.