Tale of The Three Fish

“The future-providing fish and the present-minded fish — both these prosper. But yad-bhaviṣya, ‘whatever-will-be,’ perishes.”
— Pañcatantra, Book I, Mitrabheda

This is one of the most precise and most quoted of all the Panchatantra fables — a tale that has been taught to children in Indian villages for two thousand years, and to scholars at the Sasanian court of Khosrow I, and to readers of Rumi’s Masnavi, and to medieval Spanish princes through Alfonso X’s Calila e Dimna. In just a handful of paragraphs the story sets out three philosophies of action — foresight, presence of mind, and fatalism — and shows what happens to each.

It comes from Book I of the Panchatantra, called Mitrabheda (मित्रभेद, “On the Separation of Friends”), the great first book on counsel and danger. The Sanskrit names of the three fish are not decoration. The names are the moral. To know what they mean is to know, before the story even begins, who is going to live and who is going to die.

The first fish is Anāgatavidhātṛ (अनागतविधातृ) — “the one who provides for what has not yet come.” The foreseer. The planner. The mind that lives partly in the future and acts now to influence then. The second fish is Pratyutpannamati (प्रत्युत्पन्नमति) — literally “the one whose mind is born pratyutpanna, on the spot.” Presence of mind. Quick wit. The mind that meets each moment fresh and finds, in the moment itself, the way out. The third fish is Yadbhaviṣya (यद्भविष्य) — “what-will-be.” The fatalist. The one who says yad bhāvyaṁ tad bhavatyeva — “what is to be, will be” — and uses the saying as an excuse to do nothing.

Here is the story, told with care.

In a great pond surrounded by tall reeds and lotus blossoms, in a forest of mango and śāl trees, there lived three fish who had grown up together. Their names were Anāgatavidhātṛ, Pratyutpannamati, and Yadbhaviṣya. They had been hatched in this pond. Their parents and grandparents had lived and died in this pond. The water was sweet, the weeds were thick, the insects were many, and there was no reason in the world to be elsewhere.

One evening, as the sun was going down and turning the water gold, two fishermen came along the path that ran beside the pond. They stopped. They looked at the rich water and the leaping silver of the fish. They spoke to each other.

“Brother — we have walked this road for years and never noticed this pond. Look at it. The fish are thick as leaves.”

“It is too late this evening. But tomorrow, at first light, we will come with our nets and we will not leave until the pond is empty.”

And they agreed, and they walked on.

Anāgatavidhātṛ heard them. His name means “the one who provides for what has not yet come,” and his mind was already at the next dawn. He swam at once to the deep weed-bed where the elders of the pond rested, and he called every fish to council.

“Friends. Listen. The fishermen have seen our pond. They will come at dawn. The śāstras have a clear teaching: durbalasya balena saha vairaṁ na kuryāt — the weak should not contend with the strong; they should flee, or take refuge in a fortress. We have no fortress. We must flee. We must leave the pond tonight, before the dawn brings the nets. There is a stream that runs from this pond down to the great river. Tonight, before the moon is high, we go.”

Pratyutpannamati was the first to speak in support. His name means “the one whose mind is born on the spot,” but a present mind does not refuse a wise plan. “Brother, you are right. The wise old verse says: sneha-pāśam parityajya yo na yāti vinaśyati — he who, out of attachment, refuses to leave his birth-pond, perishes in his birth-pond. The fish who can prosper anywhere never dies clinging to soil. I will go with you.”

And then Yadbhaviṣya laughed. It was a great loud confident laugh, the laugh of a fish whose name is “what-will-be.”

“Brothers, brothers. What plans you make! Why should we leave the pond of our forefathers because two fishermen have spoken of nets? Yad bhāvyaṁ tad bhavatyeva — what is to be, will be. If it is destined that I die tomorrow I cannot escape death by swimming a hundred miles. If it is destined that I live, no fisherman can take me. Everything is in the hands of God. You cannot dispose what God proposes. Without His blessing the protected die; with His blessing the unprotected live. I shall stay where my parents lived and where my grandparents lived. Run if you wish. I shall not run.”

Anāgatavidhātṛ tried again. He spoke gently. He spoke of the difference between true devotion to the divine and the false devotion that hides behind the divine to avoid the ordinary work of being alive. But Yadbhaviṣya only laughed again, louder, and went off to feed in the lotus-bed as if nothing had been said.

That night, Anāgatavidhātṛ and Pratyutpannamati and many of the wiser fish swam out through the small stream that joined the pond to the river. Yadbhaviṣya stayed.

At dawn the fishermen came, and they cast their long nets across the whole width of the pond. They drew the nets together. They drew them slowly to the bank.

And here the canonical Sanskrit version of the story does something the shorter retellings often leave out — and the part that gives Pratyutpannamati’s name its meaning. For Pratyutpannamati, the second fish, was caught. The current had been against him through the small stream, and he had not made it all the way to the river before dawn. The net came round him. He felt the weight of the rope. He felt the pull. And in that exact moment — that pratyutpanna moment, the moment born on the spot — his mind found the way out.

He went limp. He let his eyes glaze. He let his belly turn white. He played dead so completely that even his gills moved no more than the small involuntary flutter of a corpse in moving water. The fishermen drew the net up onto the bank. They began to sort the catch. They came to Pratyutpannamati and one of them held him up and said with disgust, “This one is dead already. Probably for hours. Throw him back, he is no good for the basket.” And Pratyutpannamati went sailing through the air and landed in the deep weeds at the pond’s edge, and the moment the water closed over him he came back to life and slipped away into the stream and down to the river. He had used pratyutpannamati — the mind born on the spot — to escape what foresight had not been quite quick enough to spare him from.

Yadbhaviṣya was not so lucky. He had not even tried to leave. He was caught in the great net. He did not play dead. He did not struggle in any clever way. He simply trusted to “what will be,” and what was, was the fisherman’s basket and the village kitchen.

And the story ends as the Panchatantra ends so many of its stories — without sermon, without flourish, with the bare clean fact: yadbhaviṣyo vinaśyati — “what-will-be perishes.”

What the story is really about

The Sanskrit verse Vishnu Sharma attaches to this fable is one of the most quoted in the entire Panchatantra:

anāgatavidhātā ca pratyutpannamatis tathā /
dvāv etau sukhamedhete yadbhaviṣyo vinaśyati //
“The future-providing one, and the one whose mind is born on the spot — these two prosper. But yad-bhaviṣya, ‘whatever-will-be,’ perishes.”

The surface lesson is the obvious one: foresight is best, presence of mind is the next best, and fatalism is fatal. Plan ahead when you can; respond fast when you must; never abdicate to “what will be.”

But the deeper teaching of the fable — and the reason it has been quoted by Sanskrit grammarians, Persian Sufis, and medieval European moralists for two thousand years — is something more precise. This is a meditation on three temporal modes of the mind.

Anāgatavidhātṛ lives partly in the future. His mind reaches forward and sees the dawn before the dawn arrives, and so his mind comes back into the present and acts. The future is real to him in the way it is real to a chess player thinking three moves ahead. He uses that future-vision to be elsewhere when the danger arrives.

Pratyutpannamati lives entirely in the present. His mind is “born on the spot” — every moment, fresh. He does not anticipate the dawn. He does not plan. But when the net comes round him, his mind, born exactly in the moment of the net, finds in the moment itself the trick that saves him. There is a great philosophical respect, in classical Indian thought, for the mind that meets the moment without preconception. It is not the same as the foreseer’s mind. It is a different excellence. The Panchatantra is generous enough to praise both.

Yadbhaviṣya lives nowhere. He says he is living in surrender to “what will be” — but the Panchatantra’s deepest argument is that this is not surrender to the future. It is the abdication of the present in the name of a future he refuses to influence. He is not a religious man. He is a man hiding behind a religious sentence to avoid the ordinary work of being alive. And the Panchatantra’s moral vocabulary is remarkably precise here: it does not call him impious. It calls him vinaṣṭa — perished, ruined — and the ruin begins long before the net does. He has already abdicated his agency. The net only completes what his philosophy began.

This is why the fable has had such a long life in the world’s literature. It is not a children’s story about three colorful fish, though it works perfectly as one. It is a fable about three ways of being a mind, and which two of those ways live, and which one dies.

How the story travelled

The Panchatantra moved out of India in the 6th century CE, when the Persian physician Borzūya translated it into Pahlavi for the court of the Sasanian emperor Khosrow I. From Pahlavi it passed in the 8th century into Arabic in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīla wa Dimna, where the three fish appear inside the great “Lion and Bull” cycle as one of the inset stories told between the two jackal courtiers. From Arabic the story moved into Persian as the Anvār-i Suhaylī (15th century), into Hebrew through Rabbi Joel, into Latin in John of Capua’s Directorium Humanae Vitae (13th century), and into Spanish as Calila e Dimna (1251), the version commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile and one of the earliest pieces of secular Spanish prose.

The 13th-century Persian Sufi master Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī picked up the three fish for his Masnavi, Book IV, and turned them into a parable of three stages of the spiritual seeker — the wise one who escapes the world before the world catches him, the clever one who escapes by dying-while-alive in the moment of capture, and the foolish one who refuses both paths and is killed. Rumi’s version is the most spiritually elaborated retelling, and through Rumi the story entered the deep imagination of Persian and Ottoman poetry.

Westward, Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Poissons et le Cormoran (Fables X.4, 1678) reworks the underlying motif of “doomed fish in a known-to-be-doomed pond,” and through La Fontaine it entered the European primary-school canon.

A close Buddhist parallel survives in the Pali Kakacupaka-Jātaka (Jātaka 146), in which three crows in a similar dilemma demonstrate the same three temperaments. Folklorists catalogue the motif under ATU J674 (“Forethought versus negligence”), J702 (“Necessity of foresight”), and W129 (“Fatalist refuses warning, perishes”).

For thoughtful readers — a small reflection

The hardest sentence in the whole fable is the one Yadbhaviṣya speaks just before he laughs and goes off to feed in the lotus-bed: “what is to be, will be.” It is a sentence anyone can say, and almost everyone has said, in some form, at some moment. It is so close to a wise sentence that it almost is one. The Bhagavad Gītā says, in places, things that sound like it. Marcus Aurelius says things that sound like it. The Buddha says things that sound like it.

So what makes Yadbhaviṣya’s sentence different? The Panchatantra’s answer is precise: a true surrender to “what will be” is preceded by every action you can possibly take, not by every action you refuse to take. The wise person who says “what will be will be” has already left the pond, played dead in the net, sent her children to safety, and done the long ordinary work of being alive. Then she rests in “what will be.” Yadbhaviṣya’s mistake is that he uses the great phrase as a substitute for the ordinary work, not as the ground on which the ordinary work stands.

This is why the fable closes with such moral weight. It is not condemning faith. It is condemning the use of faith as a hiding place from agency. And it is doing this in a culture — classical India — that took faith more seriously than almost any culture in human history. The Panchatantra is saying, with the gentleness of the wise, that faith and foresight and presence of mind are not opposites. They are different muscles of the same body. The fish who lives is the fish who uses every muscle he has been given.

And the fable’s quietest gift to the reader is this: at any moment of your life, you are one of three fish. You can foresee, you can respond, or you can abdicate. Two of those choices will keep you alive. The third — the one that sounds the most spiritual and feels the most calm — is the one the Panchatantra has named, two thousand years ago, with the precise Sanskrit word vinaśyati: it perishes.

Moral

अनागतविधाता च प्रत्युत्पन्नमतिस्तथा। द्वावेतौ सुखमेधेते यद्भविष्यो विनश्यति॥ — anāgata-vidhātā ca pratyutpannamatis tathā, dvāv etau sukham edhete yad-bhaviṣyo vinaśyati — “The one who provides for what has not yet come, and the one whose mind is born on the spot — these two prosper. He who says ‘whatever will be, will be’ perishes.” This is the closing verse of the fable in the Tantrākhyāyika and Pūrṇabhadra recensions, and one of the best-known maxims in the entire Pañcatantra. Vishnu Sharma is not condemning faith. He is condemning the use of faith as a hiding place from agency. Two of the three fish use the muscles they have been given; the third mistakes inaction for surrender, and the net does not distinguish.