“Once more, just once more, and I promise I will let you go.”

The turtle was now truly angry and said: “You call yourself a compassionate man, but you make me do this. If you want to eat me, why not say so, instead of making it seem that I am causing my own death?”

This fable has given birth to a number of folk similes and proverbial phrases in modern Chinese. “Cook me or not, but stand up to your convictions” was the introductory line that led to the telling of that fable recently on a Chinese local television show from San Francisco, “Cook me or not, but do something” was the meaning usually ascribed to this fable during the medieval era. One modern edition of the fable adds an Aesopic-like epimythium in the form of a well-known Chinese proverb:

“To talk about doing good all day is not equal to doing one act of charity.”

Compassion is the theme of many Chinese fables, just as it is in the European form. The “Bosom Snake” fable and the “Ungrateful animals” folktale/fable complexes are examples of true compassion met with trickery or violence on the part of the animals helped. The European “Peasant and the Snake or Dragon” is paralleled by the famous story of the “Wolf of Chungshan Mountain,” written by Ma Chung-hsi probably in the fifteenth century:

Tun Kuo was a scholar who was widely known for his compassion. One day he was riding on his donkey when he saw a group of hunters far off coming his way. A wolf came running up to him, terribly afraid.

“Kind master,” he begged, “Please let me hide in your baggage. The hunters are after me and they will kill me if they catch me. If I come out of this alive, I will never forget your kindness.”

As the scholar heard this, he emptied his book bag and let the wolf in, then piled the books in around him. The hunters arrived and left on their way.

The wolf asked to be let out and the scholar opened the bag and removed the books.

The wolf then bared his fangs and said: “I am grateful to you for saving me from the hunters, but now I am starving and if you want to help me, you must let me eat you,” and jumped on the scholar, catching him by surprise.