THE JATAKAS (Penguin Classics) by Shaw Sarah

Author:Shaw, Sarah [Shaw, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9788184750102
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

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The story of the monkey king

Mahakapi Jataka (407)

Vol. III, 369–75

The selfless monkey has always been a great favourite throughout South-East Asia. It is shown at Ajanta, Bharhut and in bas-relief on a first-century BCE gateway to the stupa at Sanchi. 1 It features as one of the Jatakamala stories, though with some differences that highlight the simple directness of the Pali version of the tale. In the later and more ornately sophisticated Sanskrit collection, the Bodhisatta is described with greatly idealized hyperbole. He leaps up into a mountain peak from his tree, performs his act of heroism with the king and the entire court as his audience and makes nothing as ‘human’ as a miscalculation in his assessment of the distance across the river. He falls short simply because the chasm is just such a great distance, even for the Bodhisatta. 2 The Pali version, as for other stories told in the two collections, shows the Bodhisatta, while still an animal, as much more like a real ‘person’, a figure sympathetic to a modern reader in that he is liable to mistakes of various kinds, such as, in this case, simply misjudging the distance. One similarity between the two versions is interesting: the Bodhisatta ties the creeper to his legs, as in the older verse portion of the Pali tale. The prose part of the story, unlike the verses, puts the creeper around the waist.

Story from the present

‘You have made yourself a bridge’

While staying at the Jetavana Grove the Teacher told this story about acting for the benefit of relatives. The occasion will appear in the Bhaddasala Jataka. 3 At that time they started up a discussion in the dhamma hall: ‘Friend, the Fully Awakened Buddha behaves well to his relatives.’ [270] The Teacher came and asked them what they had been talking about while sitting together. When they told him he said, ‘It is not just now, but before too, that the Thus-gone behaved well to relatives,’ and he told this story of long ago.

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