The Hermit and the Mouse

In the forest of the great sage Gautama there lived a hermit named Mighty-at-Prayer. He lived very simply and ate very little.

One day, as the hermit sat eating his plain meal, a crow flew overhead with a baby mouse in its beak. The crow dropped it, and the little mouse landed right beside him. The hermit picked it up gently and fed it with grains of rice, and he let it stay with him.

Some time later, the hermit saw a cat chasing his little mouse, ready to gobble it up. So, with his holy power, he turned the mouse into a big, strong cat.

But now the cat was always being chased and bothered by dogs. So the hermit changed it again, this time into a dog.

The dog was always in danger from the tigers in the forest. So at last the hermit gave it the shape of a tiger. Yet all this time he still thought of it and treated it as nothing more than his little mouse.

The country people who walked past would point and laugh. “That, a tiger? Not a bit of it!” they said. “That’s only a mouse that the holy man has changed.”

The mouse-tiger hated hearing this. He sulked and brooded. “As long as my master is alive,” he thought, “this shameful story about where I came from will never go away.”

So he made up his mind to kill the hermit.

But the hermit could see what was in his heart. Before the tiger could pounce, the hermit spoke a single word, and the ungrateful creature shrank back into a mouse, just as he had been at the start.

About this telling

Edwin Arnold called his English version of the Hitopadesha The Book of Good Counsels, and this fable is retold from it as reprinted in Hindu Literature (Project Gutenberg #13268). In Arnold’s book a vulture minister tells it at a royal council of birds. He argues against giving power to someone he regards as ungrateful and of low status, and he sums it up in a rhyme: the mouse, made a tiger, tried to take its master’s life.

The mouse transformed into a tiger should be distinguished from the separate mouse-maiden marriage tale. This page follows the tiger’s attempted attack and return to mouse form.

Read the original: Edwin Arnold, The Book of Good Counsels (Hitopadesha), in Hindu Literature (Project Gutenberg #13268)

Best for ages 6–8 — a fable about kindness, pride and remembering those who helped you.

A closer reading

Each transformation solves one immediate threat but leaves the creature dependent on the hermit’s power. Becoming a tiger does not remove his vulnerability to ridicule. The villagers’ laughter therefore creates a conflict that greater physical size cannot settle.

Planning to kill the hermit is the mouse-tiger’s destructive choice; his original smallness is not a moral fault. The minister’s status-based lesson reflects the politics of the frame and can be challenged. Readers can recognize both the harm of humiliating someone about their origins and the wrongness of responding with violence.

Try this with the story

Make a transformation ladder from mouse to tiger and write the threat beside each step. Add the villagers’ ridicule beside the tiger. Explain why one more increase in size would not resolve that final problem.

Think about it

• Which problem does each transformation solve?
• What problem remains after the creature becomes a tiger?
• How could the villagers and mouse-tiger each respond differently?

Related stories

• The Mouse Merchant — another story that begins with a little mouse
• The Story of the Cat Who Served the Lion — another fable from the same book of good counsels
• The Lion and the Mouse: Friendship Across Worlds — another tale about a mouse and a big cat