User:Bazzargh/The Tortoise and the Geese

DO NOT COPY DIRECTLY TO THE PAGE. This is just intended to illustrate an encyclopedic style, references, etc for comparison, and contains a bunch of errors.

The Tortoise and The Geese is a fable that appears in the Panchatantra, a collection of Sanskrit tales believed to date back as far as the 3rd century BCE. The story, about a tortoise being carried by two geese that falls because it cannot resist speaking, appears in the earliest English translations of the Panchatantra, dating back to 1570.

Like other fables, this one is known in a number of versions in many cultures, with different moral lessons.

Panchatantra version
The version which has arrived into the English language via the Panchatantra runs like so :

A tortoise and her two geese friends, lived in a lake full of fish to eat. However, a drought causes the lake to dry up, and the geese make ready to fly elsewhere to find food. The tortoise bemoans the fact that she cannot leave too, and wonders how she will survive. The geese suggest that they can hold a stick between them, in their beaks, and if the tortoise can keep her mouth shut no matter how much other birds taunt her, they can carry her to a new lake. Sure enough, as she is carried aloft, the other birds gather and hurl insults. Eventually the tortoise can stand it no longer and opens her mouth to reply - and falls. "So that condemning the good counsel was given her, or to say better because she would not believe them, she paid for her folly with death."

The Talkative Tortoise
A second version called The Talkative Tortoise appears in the Jataka tales (originally as Kacchapa Jataka ), traditional Buddhist stories of Buddha's past lives. It is believed that the Jataka tales and the Panchatantra share a common ancient origin. In this version, a talkative king of Benares finds a tortoise that has fallen from the sky and broken in two in his courtyard. He asks his adviser (an incarnation of Buddha) to explain this. The adviser, seeing an opportunity to admonish the king, recounts the story much as in the Panchatantra, with the moral:

And now, O mighty master, mark it well. See thou speak wisely, see thou speak in season. To death the Tortoise fell: He talked too much: that was the reason.

Recognising his own faults being described in the story, the king changes his ways.

The framing story of the king and the adviser is interesting in that it depicts the fable being composed to explain a real event.

The Flying Frog
Another version of the story exists as a Mongolian folk tale with different animal characters. In this variation, a frog is jealous of geese discussing their coming migration. He complains that the geese are fortunate to be able to fly across the sky and stay in warmer climes in winter. The geese suggest the stick plan to the frog and they set off on the migration. The frog is delighted with how clever he is to be flying with the geese, and cannot resist shouting this to his fellow frogs below; the frog falls to its doom.

Other versions
The fable has been translated into many languages, often with variations. Some notable versions are:
 * Derenbourg contains another translation of the Panchatantra, interesting for having two independent Hebrew sources.
 * La Tortue et Les deux Canards, a French tranlsation of the Panchatantra.
 * Les deux oies et la tortue is a variation in the Avadanas, another tradition of Indian folk tales.

Origins
Theodor Benfay and Joseph Jacobs note the strong parallels that exist between this and other fables:
 * The Tortoise and the Eagle, in Aesop's Fables, wherein the tortoise offers the eagle all the treasures of the world if the eagle will teach him to fly. The eagle says that this is a ridiculous idea, but is eventually persuaded to lift the tortoise into the air and drop it. The tortoise of course fails to fly. Benfay believed this story to be the origin of the Panchatantra variation; eagles are known to drop tortoises from the sky (see for example the death of Aeschylus), and the change to waterfowl of various kinds seems to have come later.
 * Aquila et Corvix and Aquila et Cornicula in the fables of Phaedrus describe a crow that persuades an eagle to drop the heavy tortoise it is carrying, which the crow then eats.
 * Buddha and the 500 princes is a story where Buddha gets a flock of birds to band together to carry other objects with twigs.
 * Benfay also mentions that a version of the tale appears in Abstemius