Jataka 286
Sālūka Jātaka
Celery
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 is nearly identical to Jātaka 30, The Ox Who Envied the Pig.” It is part of the “Be careful what you wish for” series.
“Envy not what Celery eats.” The Master told this story at Jetavana. It is about the temptation springing from a fat girl. The circumstances will be explained in the Cullanāradakassapa story (Jātaka 477). So the Master asked this monk whether it was true he had fallen in love. “Yes,” he said. “With whom?” the Master asked. “With a fat girl.” “That woman, brother,” the Master said, “is your ruin. Long ago, as now, you became food for the crowd through your desire to marry her.” Then at the request of the monk, he told him this story from the past.
Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was an ox named Big Redcoat. He had a young brother called Little Redcoat. Both of them worked for a family in some village.
In this family there was a grown-up girl who was asked in marriage by another family. Now in the first family a pig called Sālūka—or “Celery”—was being fatted to serve for a feast on the wedding day. (“Sālūka” literally is the edible root of a lotus flower.) The pig used to sleep in its own pen.
One day Little Redcoat said to his brother, “Brother, we work for this family, and we help them to earn their living. Yet they only give us grass and straw to eat, while they feed the pig with rice porridge and let it sleep in a pen. And what can the pig do for them?”
“Brother,” said Big Redcoat, “don't envy his porridge. They want to make a feast of him on our young lady’s wedding day. That is why they are fattening him up. Wait a few days, and you'll see him dragged out of his pen, killed, chopped into bits, and eaten up by the visitors.” So saying this, he composed the first two stanzas:
“Envy not what Celery eats,
Deadly is the food he gets.
Be content and eat your chaff.
It means long life on your behalf.
“By and bye the guest will come,
With his gossips all and some.
All chopped up poor Celery
With his big flat snout will lie.”
Figure: Envy not what Celery eats
A few days later, the wedding guests came and Sālūka was killed and made a meal of. Both oxen, seeing what became of him, thought their own chaff was the best.
The Master, in his perfect wisdom, repeated the third stanza by way of explanation:
“When they saw the flat snout lie
All chopped up, poor Celery,
Said the oxen, best by half
Surely is our humble chaff!”
When the Master finished this discourse, he taught the Four Noble Truths at the conclusion of which the monk in question attained the fruition of the First Path (stream-entry). Then he identified the birth: “At that time, the stout girl was the same, the lovesick brother was Sālūka, Ānanda was Little Redcoat, and I was Big Redcoat.”
