The Demon in the Pool

Also known as Nalapana Jataka

• 2 minute read
• Ages 7-11
• Jataka Tales

A troop of eighty thousand monkeys travelled through a forest with their chief, and in a hot season they came to a clearing with a pool in it.

The water was clear and cool and every one of them wanted to drink.

The chief stopped them.

The footprints

He walked all the way round the pool first, slowly, looking at the ground, and then he came back and told them nobody was to touch it.

"Why not?"

"Count the tracks," he said.

They looked.

There were footprints going down into the water from every direction, a great many of them, deer and boar and monkeys and birds.

There were none coming out.

What was in it

A demon lived in that pool and took anything that entered the water. That was the whole of it. Everything that had ever gone in for a drink was still in there.

The demon came up when he realised they had stopped, and stood in the shallows, and said what such things say, which was that the water was excellent and they should come in.

"We are not coming in," said the chief.

"Then you will not drink."

"We will drink," said the chief. "We are simply not coming in."

The reeds

Round the edge of that clearing grew reeds, tall and straight and hollow.

The chief cut one and blew through it and it was blocked at every joint, the way a reed is. So he took it in both hands and drew it through, and the story says that after that every reed in that place grew hollow all the way down, and they still do.

It is a story explaining a real thing, which is that there are reeds you can drink through.

The monkeys cut them and lay along the bank, well back from the edge, and drank through the reeds without one of them putting so much as a hand in the water.

And the demon stood in his pool and watched eighty thousand monkeys drink their fill and leave.