Vātagga Sindhava Jātaka

“He for whose sake.” The Master told this story at Jetavana. It is about a certain landowner.

At Sāvatthi, we learn, a handsome woman saw this man. He was also handsome, and she fell in love with him. The passion within her was like a fire burning through her body. She lost her senses, both of body and of mind. She cared nothing for food. She only lay down hugging the frame of the bedstead.

Her friends and handmaidens asked her what troubled her and why she lay hugging the bedstead. “What is the matter?” they wanted to know. The first few times they asked she did not answer. But as they continued pressing her, she told them what it was.

“Don't worry,” they said, “we’ll bring him to you,” and they went and had a talk with the man. At first he refused, but because of their persistence, he at last consented. They got his promise to come at a certain hour on a fixed day, and then they told the woman.

She prepared her chamber and dressed in her finest clothing. Then she sat on the bed waiting for him to come. When he arrived, he sat down beside her. Then a thought came into her mind. “If I accept his advances at once and make myself cheap, my pride will be humbled. To let him have his will on the very first day he comes would be out of place. I will play hard-to-catch today, and then afterward I will give in.” So no sooner had he touched her and begun to flirt, then she grabbed his hands and spoke roughly to him. She told him to go away and that she did not want him. He shrank back angrily and went home.

When the women found out what she had done and that the man had gone off, they scolded her. “Here you are,” they said, “so in love with somebody that you lie down and refuse to eat. We had great difficulty persuading the man to come. Finally we bring him, and then you have nothing to say to him!” She told them why she had done it and off they went off. They warned her that she would be the subject of gossip.

The man never went to see her again. When she found she had lost him, once again she stopped eating and soon she died. When the man heard of her death, he took flowers, scents, and perfumes and went to Jetavana. There he saluted the Master and sat on one side.

The Master asked him, “How is it, lay brother, that we never see you here?” He told him the whole story, adding that he had avoided waiting on the Buddha all this time from shame. The Master said, “Layman, the woman sent for you because of her passion, and then she would have nothing to do with you. She sent you away angry. Just so in the past she fell in love with wise persons, sent for them, and when they came she refused to have anything to do with them. This troubled them and sent them away.” And he told him this story from the past.

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was the King of Benares, the Bodhisatta was a Sindh horse. They called him Swift-as-the-Wind, and he was the King’s ceremonial horse. The grooms used to take him to bathe in the Ganges. There a certain female donkey saw him, and she fell in love with him. Trembling with passion, she neither ate grass nor drank water. She just pined away and became thin until she was nothing but skin and bone.

Then a foal of hers, seeing her pining away, said, “Why do you eat no grass, mother, and drink no water. Why do you pine away and lie trembling on the ground? What is the matter?” She would not say. But after he asked her repeatedly, she told him what was wrong. Then her foal comforted her, saying, “Mother, do not be troubled. I will bring him to you.”

So when Swift-as-the-Wind went to bathe, the foal approached him and said, “Sir, my mother is in love with you. She will not eat, and she is pining away to death. Give her life!”

“Good, my lad, I will,” said the horse. “When my bath is over the grooms let me go exercise for a while on the river bank. Bring your mother to that place.”

So the foal fetched his mother and took her to the river bank. Then he hid himself nearby.

The groom let Swift-as-the-Wind go for a run. He saw the donkey and went up to her.

Now when the horse went up and began to sniff at her, the donkey thought to herself, “If I make myself cheap and let him have his way as soon as he comes here, my honor and pride will perish. I must act as though I do not want him.” So she gave him a kick on the lower jaw and scampered away. It broke his jaw and nearly killed him. “What does she matter to me?” thought Swift-as-the-Wind. He felt ashamed and went off.

Figure: Not what he expected!

Then the donkey repented. She lay down in grief. And her son the foal came up to her and asked her a question in the following lines:

“He for whose sake you thin and yellow grew,

And would not eat a bite,

That dear beloved one is come to you,

Why do you take to flight?”

Hearing her son’s voice, the donkey repeated the second verse:

“If at the very first, when by her side

He stands, without delay

A woman yields, all humbled is her pride,

Therefore I ran away.”

In these words she explained her nature to her son.

The Master, in his perfect wisdom, repeated the third stanza:

“If she refuse a suitor nobly born

Who by her side would stay,

As Kundalī mourned Windswift, she must mourn

For many a long day.”

(Kundalī is the name of the female donkey.)

When this discourse ended the Master taught the Four Noble Truths, at the conclusion of which this landowner attained stream-entry. Then he identified the birth: “This woman was the female donkey, and I was Swift-as-the-Wind.”

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