One day the bull was tired of this and lay down in the woods, pretending to be sick and dying.  The merchant had to leave him behind as he traveled on with his caravan.  (In the original, Panchatantra, the bull breaks a leg as a result of the wagon being too heavily loaded.  In either version the moral of the passage is that greed leads to disaster, or, do all things in moderation.)

In the forest lived a lion called Candapinggala and his patih, the jackal Sambada.  One day a pack of jackals rushed in and complained that they were being chased and wounded by a bull.  (The moral of this passage is obviously that one, even in a group, should not attack a strong character, which is what the jackals had done but did not admit.)

Then the patih told them the story of the drum: a jackal heard a drum that was making a tremendous noise while being beaten by a good drummer during a battle.  Later the drummer was killed and the jackal found the drum.  Thinking that something that made so much noise must have a lot of meat in it, the jackal tried to bite it open, but after breaking his teeth on the hard wood and tough skin, he found only air inside.

So, at the instigation of the jackals, the lion decided he wanted to meet the bull.  When the two big animals met, they seemed to appreciate each other.  The bull explained that he was Siwa’s mount and that he had learned many a word of wisdom from the god.  The lion wanted to benefit from this wisdom and offered the bull the grass in his woods.  “I would count myself lucky if you would deign to be my friend,” said the king of the forest.  Their friendship developed to the extent that the lion ceased to hunt and was satisfied with vegetarian food.

The jackals, who wanted to live off the pickings of the lion’s victims, did not agree with this way of life.  Sambada told them the story of King Gajadruma, who imitated the silly talk of his foolish friends and made them generals.  Because of this, his country was conquered and he lost his throne.

Sambada then tells the fable of the talking tortoise to illustrate the point that one should not bother to reply to fools, here represented by two jackals.

A tortoise lived in a lake that was drying up.  Now there was a pair of geese there who were the tortoise’s best friends.  As the lake bottom had almost totally dried up, the geese decided to migrate to a riverbank in another part of the country.