Jataka 233
Vikiṇṇaka Jātaka
The Barbed Harpoon
as told by Eric Van Horn
originally translated by William Henry Denham Rouse, Cambridge University
originally edited by Professor Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge University
This story almost reads like a Christian parable. The Buddha uses the image of a barbed harpoon that is stuck in the heart as a simile for sense desire. It is an apt image. A barbed harpoon cannot be safely removed, and at the same time it is fatal.
“The barb is in your back.” The Master told this story while he was at Jetavana. It is about a backsliding brother.
He was brought into the Dharma Hall and asked if he were really backsliding. To this he replied “yes.” When he was asked why, he replied, “Because of sense desire.” The Master said, “Sense desire is like a two-barbed harpoon that is shot into the heart. Once there, they kill, just as the barbed harpoon killed the crocodile.” Then he told them this story from the past.
Once upon a time, the Bodhisatta was the King of Benares, and he was a good king. One day he entered his park and went to the side of a lake. And those who were skilled in dancing and singing began to dance and to sing. The fish and tortoises, eager to hear the sound of song, flocked together and went along beside the King. And the King, seeing a mass of fish as long as a palm trunk, asked his courtiers, “Now why do these fish follow me?”
The courtiers said, “They have come to offer their services to their lord.”
The King was pleased when he heard this - that they had come to serve him - and he ordered that rice should be given to them regularly. But when it was time to feed them some of the fish came and some did not, and so some of the rice was wasted. They told the King about this. “From now on,” the King said, “when it is time to give the fish their rice, let a drum be sounded. At the sound of the drum, when the fish flock together, give the food to them.”
From then on the feeder caused a drum to sound, and when they flocked together, he gave the rice to the fish.
On day as they gathered together to eat the food, a crocodile came and ate some of the fish. The feeder told the King about this. The King listened and replied, “When the crocodile is eating the fish,” he said, “stab him with a harpoon and capture him.”
“Good,” the man said. He went aboard a boat, and when the crocodile came to eat the fish, he stabbed him with a harpoon. It went through his back. Mad with pain, the crocodile went off with the harpoon. Seeing that he was wounded, the feeder spoke to him with this stanza:
“The barb is through your back, go where you may.
The beat of drum, calling my fish to feed,
Brought you, pursuing, greedy, on the way
Which brought you also to your direst need.”
Figure: Doomed by Greed
When the crocodile got to his own place, he died.
To explain this matter, the Master - having become perfectly serene - spoke the second verse as follows:
“So, when the world tempts any man to desire
Who knows no other law but his own will and wish,
He perishes amid his friends in a fire,
Even as the crocodile that ate the fish.”
When this discourse ended, the Master taught the Four Noble Truths. At the conclusion of the teaching, the backsliding monk attained stream-entry. The Master then identified the birth: “In those days I was the King of Benares.”
