The Snake Who Paid Cash

A Brahman farmer, whose land yielded little despite his labor, spotted an imposing snake near an ant-hill and, assuming it was the field's guardian deity gone unhonored, began offering it a saucer of milk every day. Each morning after, he found a single gold coin left in its place, and continued this daily exchange happily.

One day, called away on business, he sent his son to deliver the milk instead. When the boy found a coin the next day too, greed overtook him: reasoning that the ant-hill must be full of gold, he decided to kill the snake outright and take everything at once, striking it with a club as he delivered the next offering.

The snake survived the blow and struck back in self-defense, killing the boy instantly. When the grieving father learned what had happened, he understood immediately that his son's own greed, not the snake's nature, had caused the tragedy.

Still hoping to preserve what remained of the relationship, the father returned the next morning with milk as always, trying to make peace by explaining his son had only "met the death his own judgment deserved." But the snake, though willing to continue the arrangement, gave him an honest, sobering reply: a funeral pyre can be dismantled and moved, but a heart wounded and patched back together always carries the scar of what happened, no matter how the relationship continues afterward.