Jataka 267
Kakkatā Jātaka
The Horned Crab
as told by Eric Van Horn
originally translated by William Henry Denham Rouse, Cambridge University
originally edited by Professor Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge University
Finally we have a story with a female hero! It is a story of faith, courage, integrity, and wisdom.
“Horned creature.” The Master told this story while he was at Jetavana. It is about a certain woman.
We are told that a certain landowner of Sāvatthi was on a journey with his wife. They traveled into the country for the purpose of collecting debts. There they fell among robbers. Now the wife was very beautiful and charming. The robber chief was so taken by her that he proposed killing the husband to get her. But the woman was good and virtuous, a devoted wife. She fell at the robber’s feet, crying, “My lord, if you kill my husband for love of me, I will take poison or stop my breath and kill myself too! I will not go with you. Do not kill my husband needlessly!” In this way she begged him off.
They both got back safely to Sāvatthi. As they passed the monastery in Jetavana it occurred to them that they would visit it and salute the Master. So to the perfumed cell they went, and after salutation they sat down on one side. The Master asked them where they had been. “To collect our debts,” they replied. “Did your journey pass off without mishap?” he asked next. “We were captured by robbers on the way,” said the husband, “and the chief wanted to murder me. But my wife here begged me off, and I owe my life to her.” Then the Master said, “You are not the only one, layman, whose life she has saved. In days gone by she saved the lives of other wise men.” And then at his request the Master told this story from the past.
Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was the King of Benares, there was a great lake in the Himalaya Mountains. A great horned crab lived there. Because he lived there, the place was known as the Crab Tarn. (A “tarn” is a small mountain lake.) The crab was enormous. He was as big as a threshing floor. It would catch elephants and kill and eat them. And from their fear of it, the elephants would not go down to the lake.
Now the Bodhisatta was conceived by the mate of an elephant who was the leader of a herd. He lived nearby this Crab Tarn. The mother, in order to be safe until her delivery, sought another place on a mountain. There she delivered a son. In due time he grew to years of wisdom. He was great and mighty and prospered, and he was like a purple mountain of collyrium. (Collyrium is mouthwash. Nope. I don’t get it, either.)
He chose another elephant for his mate, and he resolved to catch this crab. So with his mate and his mother, he sought out the elephant herd. Finding his father, he proposed to go and catch the crab.
“You will not be able to do that, my son,” he said.
But he begged his father again and again to give him leave, until at last he said, “Well, you may try.”
So the young elephant collected all the elephants beside the Crab Tarn and led them down to the lake. “Does the crab catch them when they go down, while they are feeding, or when they come up again?” he asked.
They replied, “When they come up again.”
“Well then,” he said, “all of you go down to the lake and eat whatever you want and then come up first. I will follow behind you and come up last.” And this they did.
The crab, seeing the Bodhisatta coming up last, caught his feet tight in his claw, like a smith who seizes a lump of iron in a huge pair of tongs. The Bodhisatta’s mate did not leave him but stood close by him. The Bodhisatta pulled at the crab, but he could not make him budge. Then the crab pulled and pulled the elephant towards himself. In deadly fear the elephant roared and roared. Hearing this all the other elephants, in deadly terror, ran off trumpeting and dropping excrement. Even his mate could not stand the pitched battle, and she began to make off. Then to tell her how he was held a prisoner, the elephant uttered the first stanza, hoping to stop her from her flight:
“Horn-clawed creature with projecting eyes,
Tarn-bred, hairless, clad in bony shell,
He has caught me! Hear my woeful cries!
Mate! Don’t leave me, for you love me well!”
Then his mate turned round and repeated the second stanza to his comfort:
“Leave you? never! never will I go,
Noble husband, with your years threescore.
All four quarters of the earth can show
None so dear as you have been before.”
In this way she encouraged him, saying, “Noble sir, I will now beg the crab to let you go.” And she addressed the crab in the third stanza:
“Of all the crabs that in the sea,
Ganges, or Nerbudda be,
You are best and chief, I know.
Hear me, let my husband go!”
(The Nerbudda is a river in India.)
As she spoke the crab’s fancy was smitten with the sound of the female voice. Forgetting himself for a moment, he let go of the elephant’s leg. He suspected nothing of what the elephant would do when he was set free. The elephant quickly lifted his foot and stepped on the crab’s back. At once his eyes popped out. The elephant shouted a cry of joy. The other elephants all ran up. They pulled the crab along and pinned him to the ground and trampled him to mincemeat. His two claws broke apart from his body.
Figure: Forgetting himself for a moment…
This Crab Tarn, being near the Ganges, would fill with water whenever there was a flood. When the water subsided it ran from the lake back into the Ganges. When it next flooded these two claws were lifted and floated along the river. One of them reached the sea. The other was found by ten royal brothers while they were playing in the water. They took it and made a drum out of it that they called Ānaka. The Titans found the one that reached the sea. They made it into the drum called Āḷambara. The titans were later defeated in a battle with Sakka. They ran off and left the drum behind. Then Sakka kept it for his own use, and because of this drum they say, “There is thunder like the Āḷambara cloud!”
(Ānaka and Āḷambara are both types of drums.)
When this discourse ended the Master taught the Four Noble Truths, at the conclusion of which both the husband and the wife attained stream-entry. Then he identified the birth: “In those days, this lay sister was the she-elephant, and I was her mate.”
