Sacred Animals of India by Nanditha Krishna

Author:Nanditha Krishna [Krishna, Nanditha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184751826
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Later, Gautama’s jealous cousin Devadatta tried to make a mad elephant Nilagiri charge at the Buddha and kill him. But the Buddha stopped the charging animal in its tracks and pacified it. The animal prostrated before the Buddha and became his devotee.

The elephant is so closely associated with the Buddha that the birth of Gautama is invariably represented by the elephant entering Mayadevi’s womb in the sculptured friezes of Bharhut, Sanchi, Gandhara and Nagarjunakonda.

In another Jataka tale, the Bodhisattva was born as a white elephant who ruled over eighty thousand elephants, at a time when Brahmadatta ruled Benares. He was captured and given to the king, but refused to eat without feeding his blind mother, for which he was freed by the king.

There is a variant of the Gajendra moksha story in Jataka literature, where a giant crab catches the Bodhisattva elephant’s leg but is crushed to death. This story is sculpted on an architrave at Bharhut.

The world rests on the head of Mahapadma, a great elephant, and earthquakes are attributed to the moving of Mahapadma’s head. The elephant represents the powers of a Buddha: miraculous aspiration, analysis, intention and effort.

According to the Theravada tradition, when Gautama was practising austerities alone in the wilderness, an elephant gave him food and shelter. In the annual Dantadhatu (tooth relic) festival of Sri Lanka, the elephant alone could carry the sacred tooth of the Buddha in procession. The vehicle of Akshobhya, the primordial Buddha associated with consciousness (vijnana) is the elephant, as is the vehicle of Balabhadra, brother of Krishna, who presides over agriculture and holds the halayudha (plough) as his weapon.

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