Kacchapa Jataka No. 215

Jataka No. 215, the Kacchapa Jataka of the Dukanipata, opens with the monk Kokalika, who stayed with the Buddha's two chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, during the rains retreat (the three-month monsoon season when monks settled in one place). When they left, Kokalika went about the villages announcing their presence in hopes of gaining gifts for himself, an interference the two elders refused to reward. Later, when they returned with many followers and Kokalika received nothing, he slandered them publicly, claiming they harbored wicked desires, and was expelled by the community for disrupting the visit. He then returned to the Buddha and repeated the same slander three times despite being warned. Boils the size of mustard seeds erupted across his body, grew to the size of tree seeds, and he died soon after, reborn in a hell reserved for such offenses. The Buddha then told his own monks that this was not the first time Kokalika's unchecked talkativeness had brought about his own ruin.

In the very distant past, King Brahmadatta of Benares was himself extremely and notoriously talkative, and the Bodhisatta, serving faithfully as his royal adviser, had long watched patiently for a fitting opportunity to correct this flaw without ever giving direct offense. In a Himalayan pond lived a tortoise who had become close friends with two young wild geese. When the geese invited him to visit their home on Mount Cittakuta, in a cave of gold, the tortoise eagerly agreed without pausing to consider how he, a creature with neither wings nor the means to fly, might actually make the long journey there. The geese devised a solution between themselves: he would grip a wooden stick firmly between his teeth while they each held one end of it in their beaks and carried him aloft between them through the open sky.

They warned him sternly before lifting off the ground: keep your mouth shut and say not a single word, no matter what you hear shouted up from below, for the instant you open your jaws to speak, you will fall. The tortoise agreed readily, confident that so simple a promise would cost him nothing at all.

Rising into the sky, the two geese carried the tortoise across valleys and towns until they passed directly above the king's own palace in Benares. The village children below spotted the strange sight and shouted their observation aloud to one another, pointing up at the sky and laughing at the sight of a tortoise suspended helplessly between two birds high above their heads. Indignant at being mocked by voices he felt were far beneath him, the tortoise forgot his promise entirely and opened his mouth to deliver an angry retort. The moment he did, his grip on the stick failed entirely and gave way. He fell from the sky into the palace's open courtyard and split in two upon the stones.

The king, discovering the broken, lifeless tortoise lying in his own courtyard, asked his wise adviser how such a strange and sudden death had come about at all. The Bodhisatta seized the moment he had long been waiting for and explained that the tortoise had died from nothing but his own unchecked tongue, reciting verses to the effect that those who cannot restrain excessive speech, speaking when silence alone would have saved them, bring about their own misfortune exactly as the tortoise had just done. Recognizing at once that the lesson was meant for him every bit as much as for the dead tortoise, the king took it fully to heart. From that day forward he became, by his own deliberate effort, a man of notably few words, weighing each remark before he let it leave his mouth.

At the final conclusion of the discourse, the Buddha identified the birth: Kokalika was the tortoise then just as he was now. The two geese were the Buddha's own chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, in an earlier life. King Brahmadatta, who finally learned to hold his tongue, was Ananda. The wise adviser who seized his long-awaited chance to teach a talkative king was the Buddha himself.