The Tortoise Who Loved His Home

Also known as Kacchapa Jataka

• 3 minute read
• Ages 6-10
• Jataka Tales

A tortoise lived in a lake and would not leave it.

He had been born there. He knew the shape of the bottom and where the weed grew thickest and which bank warmed first in the morning, and he had no interest in anywhere else at all.

The drought

Then a dry year came and the lake began to shrink.

The birds went first. Then the fish moved down the channel to the river while there was still water to move through. Then the frogs went, and the water snakes, and the lake became a pond and then a wide patch of mud with a puddle in the middle.

The tortoise's friends came and told him to go while the channel was still passable.

"There is a river two days from here."

"I live here," he said.

"There will not be a here."

"I have been in this lake forty years," said the tortoise. "It has been low before. It comes back."

And they went, and he stayed.

The mud

The puddle dried and the mud hardened, and the tortoise dug down into it, which is what tortoises do, and closed himself in and waited for the rain.

He was down there a long time.

And a potter came out to that lake bed with a spade, because dried lake mud is good clay, and he dug, and about a foot down he found something hard.

The potter

He got the tortoise out and turned him over and looked at him.

The tortoise was alive, and thin, and had been down there for months.

And the potter did the thing the story wants you to notice: he did not take him home and he did not leave him. He carried him two days to the river and put him in it, and then walked back and got his clay.

After

The story is usually told as a warning about refusing to move, and that is in it.

But it ends with the potter, and it ends there on purpose.

The tortoise was wrong. He was wrong for forty years' worth of good reasons, and he had been told plainly by people who cared about him, and he stayed anyway, and it very nearly killed him.

And what saved him was not learning his lesson. It was a man he had never met, who had come out to dig clay and had two spare days.