The Hundred-Heads by Jorge Luis Borges

The Hundred-Heads is a fish created by a hundred ill-tempered words uttered in the course of an otherwise blameless life. A Chinese biography of the Buddha tells that he once met some fishermen who were dragging in a net. After much toil they hauled up on to the shore a huge fish with one head of an ape, another of a dog, another of a horse, another of a fox, another of a hog, another of a tiger, and so on, up to one hundred. The Buddha asked the fish:

‘Are you Kapila?'

‘Yes, I am,' the Hundred-heads answered before dying. The Buddha explained to his disciples that in a previous incarnation Kapila was a Brahman who had become a monk and whose knowledge of the holy texts was unrivalled. Upon occasion, when his fellow students misread a word, Kapila would call them ape-head, dog-head, horse-head, and so forth. After his death, the karma of those many insults caused him to be reborn as a sea monster, weighed down by all the heads he had bestowed upon his companions.