The Monkey Who Outwitted the Crocodile

At Jetavana, the monks spoke of a fresh plot by Devadatta to murder the Buddha. The Buddha told them that this was far from the first time Devadatta had tried something of the sort, and told the story of an age long past to prove it.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta was born as the leader of a troop of monkeys living beside a great river. On the far bank stood an island thick with fruit-bearing trees. Each day the monkey king crossed to it by leaping onto a single large, flat rock that broke the river's current partway across, then springing the rest of the distance to the island and back again each evening.

In the river lived a crocodile and his pregnant wife. One day, tasting a piece of fruit the monkey king had dropped into the water, the wife found it so delicious that she developed a craving. It was not for the fruit itself, but for the heart of the monkey who ate such food, since she believed it must be the true source of his vigor and grace. She pressed her husband relentlessly until he agreed to catch the monkey for her, and, knowing the daily crossing point, he swam out to the flat rock and settled himself just beneath its surface to wait.

That evening, returning from the island, the monkey king approached the crossing point as always, but something made him pause. Looking closely, he noticed the rock now sat higher above the waterline than it ever had before, a small but telling change from its usual profile.

Suspicious, the monkey called out to the rock three times, as was his habit in greeting: "Rock, my friend!" On the third call, the crocodile, confused and forgetting himself, answered back as though the greeting had been meant for him. In that single mistaken reply, he gave his own hiding place away completely.

Realizing he had been discovered, the crocodile admitted the truth outright, that he had been sent to seize the monkey and carry his heart back to his wife. Thinking quickly, the monkey king feigned calm acceptance of his fate, telling the crocodile that he would gladly offer his heart, but that, being a creature who lived in trees, he certainly did not carry it around inside his body. It hung instead from a nearby branch like a piece of fruit, he said, and the crocodile would need to open his mouth wide to receive it properly once the monkey leapt down to present it.

The crocodile, simple-minded and eager, opened his jaws wide in anticipation, and in that same instant, true to his own nature, closed his eyes, since crocodiles cannot open their mouths and their eyes together. The monkey king seized the one moment of blindness this gave him. He sprang from the rock onto the crocodile's very head, used it as a stepping stone, and leapt clear to the safety of the far bank before the crocodile even understood what had happened.

Both outwitted and strangely impressed, the crocodile could only marvel aloud that a creature possessing truthfulness, wisdom, courage, and generosity together was not one that any enemy could easily overcome. The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the treacherous crocodile had been Devadatta, and his conniving wife had been Cinca. She was the very woman who, in the Buddha's final life, would falsely accuse him of wrongdoing in an attempt to destroy his reputation. He himself, he said, had been the monkey king. Jataka No. 57 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, showing that the same patterns of scheming malice had pursued him across many lifetimes, and had been overcome each time not by force but by presence of mind.

The monkey's daily greeting to the rock was never meant as a test; it was simply a small, affectionate ritual he performed without expecting any reply. That very ordinariness is what made the crocodile's answer so damning, since nothing about an inanimate stone should ever have responded at all. The ambush depended entirely on the crocodile managing to remain as silent and unremarkable as the rock he was hiding beneath.

The monkey's claim that his heart hung from a branch like fruit worked not because it was especially clever in isolation. It fit neatly into the same misunderstanding that had started the whole plot: the crocodile's wife's belief that eating strange fruit was what gave the monkey his heart's supposed power. Having already accepted one piece of nonsense about hearts and fruit, the crocodile had no particular reason to doubt a second one offered in exactly the same terms.