The Brahmin and the Cobra

In a certain place there lived a Brahmin named Haridatta. He was a farmer, but no matter how hard he worked, his fields gave him very little.

One day, at the end of the hottest part of the afternoon, he lay down in the shade of a tree to have a nap. Suddenly he saw a great cobra with a spreading hood come sliding out of an anthill close by.

“This must be the guardian spirit of my field,” the Brahmin thought, “and I have never once honoured it. No wonder my farming has gone so badly. I will go and pay my respects at once.”

So he fetched some milk, poured it into a bowl and carried it to the anthill. “O Guardian of this Field,” he said aloud, “all this time I did not know that you lived here. That is why I have never come to honour you. Please forgive me.” He set the milk down and went home.

Next morning he came back to look, and there in the bowl lay a gold coin. From then on the same thing happened every day. The Brahmin left milk for the cobra, and each morning he found a gold coin.

One day the Brahmin had to go to the village, so he told his son to take the milk to the anthill. The son carried the milk there, put it down and went home. The next day he went back and found a gold coin in the bowl.

“That anthill must be full of gold coins,” he thought. “I’ll kill the snake and take them all for myself.”

So the next day, when he brought the milk, he hit the cobra on the head with a big stick. But it was not the snake’s fate to die. It escaped, and in a fury it bit the boy with its sharp fangs. He fell down dead on the spot. His family built a funeral fire for him near the field.

Two days later the father came home. When he learned what had happened to his son, he wept and mourned. But after a while he took the bowl of milk to the anthill again and called out loudly in praise of the cobra.

He waited a long, long time. At last the cobra came, but it only put its head out of the opening in the anthill.

“It is greed that has brought you here,” said the cobra, “so much greed that you can forget the death of your own son. From now on we can never be friends. Your son struck me without thinking, because he was young, and I bit him and he died. How can I ever forget the blow of that stick? And how can you ever forget the grief of losing your son?”

Then the cobra gave the Brahmin a precious pearl. “Do not come back here again,” it said, and it vanished into the anthill.

The Brahmin took the pearl and went home, cursing his son’s foolishness.

About this story

This fable comes from Joseph Jacobs’s Indian Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg #7128), where it is called “The Gold-giving Serpent.” In his notes Jacobs says he took it from Benfey’s German translation of the third book of the Panchatantra.

Jacobs’s notes compare Indian, Greek and Latin versions and mention a parallel collected by the Brothers Grimm. His claim that one version proves the origin of the others is a nineteenth-century scholarly argument, not something the plot alone can establish.

Read the original: Joseph Jacobs, ‘The Gold-giving Serpent’, in Indian Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg #7128)

Reading guidance: Ages 9–12; includes a deliberate attack, a fatal snakebite and a child’s funeral. The magical snake exchange is a folktale event, not advice for approaching wildlife.

A closer reading

The son’s first error is an inference: one daily coin becomes, in his imagination, a hoard he can seize. His second is to replace an ongoing exchange with violence. The story never confirms his imagined stockpile, so the fatal attack rests on an untested assumption as well as greed.

The final pearl is not a restoration of the arrangement. The cobra gives a parting gift while refusing further contact. This makes the ending about boundaries after harm: material generosity does not automatically renew trust. The father wants the old reward to resume, but both families now carry memories the bowl of milk cannot erase.

Try this with the story

Trace the three different gifts—the daily coin, the son’s imagined hoard and the final pearl. Mark which are real in the narrative and what each means to its recipient. Explain why the pearl ends the relationship instead of repairing it.

Questions to ask

• What evidence does the son have for a hidden hoard?
• How does the final pearl differ from the daily coin?
• Can the cobra give a gift and still refuse renewed friendship?

You may also like

• The Snake’s Revenge — another tale of a snake who does not forget
• The White Man And Snake — another story about trusting a snake
• The Story of the Tiger and the Traveller — another Indian fable about greed for gold