The talkative tortoise
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
Short, funny, and the story most likely to be quoted at a Desi child who won't stop talking.
A tortoise called Kambugriva lived in a lake with two geese for friends, and he talked. He talked in the morning and he talked at night, and the geese loved him anyway.
Then came a year with no rain. The lake shrank to a puddle, and the geese said they would have to leave for a lake beyond the hills.
"Take me," said the tortoise. "I can't walk that far and I'll die here."
They thought about it, and came up with something clever. They would hold a stick between their beaks, one at each end, and the tortoise would bite the middle, and they would carry him.
"One condition," they said. "You must not open your mouth. Not once. Not for anything."
"Obviously," said the tortoise.
So they flew. And it was astonishing — the fields, the river, the hills going by underneath.
And in a village below, people came out and looked up and shouted to each other: "Look at that! Two clever geese carrying a tortoise! What clever birds! What clever, clever birds!"
And the tortoise, who had thought of the whole thing and could not bear it for one second longer, opened his mouth to say it was my idea —
and the rest of the story takes about a second and a half.
Not simply "don't talk too much" — it's about needing the credit. He'd have kept his life if he could have let two geese be praised for his plan. Children find it very funny; teenagers go rather quiet.
It's in the Jataka tales too, where the tortoise is a previous life of a famously talkative monk and the Buddha tells the story pointedly to his face. Some tellings soften the ending and have him land in water; the original does not.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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