The prince who climbed down a cliff to feed a starving tigress with his own body

Three princes walking through a forest

In the kingdom of Maharatha — long before the Buddha was the Buddha, in one of the births in which his mind was being slowly shaped toward awakening — there was a king who had three sons. The eldest was Mahapranada, the middle was Mahadeva, and the youngest was Mahasattva, whose name means Great Being. He had been called this from birth because his nurses said that when he was a newborn, he would not cry when other infants cried — he would grow still and listen, as if asking what could be done.

When the three princes were young men, they went together with their attendants to a forest park to study. The forest had an inner reach that few visited — a steep gorge cut by an old river, shaded by tall sal trees, the light coming through in long green bars.

After their lessons, the three brothers asked their attendants to wait, and went walking together into the gorge.

They walked for some time. The forest grew quieter. The birds stopped calling.

Then, at the foot of a cliff, they came to a clearing. And in the clearing they saw a tigress.

She was lying on her side. Her ribs showed through her coat. Her tongue was dark and dry. Around her, against her belly, five newborn cubs were trying to nurse — but she had no milk. Her body had been emptied by hunger.

She turned her head as the princes watched. She looked at her own cubs. The princes saw, in that look, a thing they had read about in scripture but never seen: a mother so starved that she was about to eat her own young.

The argument among the brothers

The eldest brother said: "She will eat them. Look — she is already gathering herself."

The middle brother said: "We must do something. There must be food in the forest. We must hunt some animal and bring it to her."

The eldest said: "There is no time. By the time we hunt, the cubs will be dead. And what flesh would she accept? She is too weak to chew. She needs blood. Living blood."

The youngest brother — Mahasattva — said quietly: "Living blood she could have."

The two elder brothers turned and looked at him.

"Brother," said the eldest, "do not say what I think you are about to say. We are princes. Our father has only us. Our mother's heart would crack in half. Come. We will walk on. The forest is the forest. Many things die in it daily. We cannot save them all."

Mahasattva said: "I do not need to save them all. I only need to save these six. Walk on, brothers. Wait for me at the eastern edge of the gorge. I will catch up."

The two brothers looked into Mahasattva's eyes and saw that he had decided. They had grown up with him. They knew the look. They wept and embraced him and said nothing more, because they understood that no argument would reach him. They turned and walked back toward the path. They told themselves he would change his mind. They told themselves he would simply pray, perhaps, and follow them.

He did not follow them.

The prince at the edge of the cliff

Mahasattva went first to a high stone above the clearing — a stone overhanging the place where the tigress lay. He stood there. He looked down at the dying mother and the five cubs. He laid one hand on his own chest.

He said, aloud, the vow that the canonical text records:

"न मे काये स्पृहा कापि न च भोगेषु जीविते। बोधाय हि शरीरं इदं त्यजामि सत्त्वहिताय वै॥" (na me kaye sprha kapi na cha bhogeshu jivite / bodhaya hi shariram idam tyajami sattva-hitaya vai — "I have no clinging to this body, nor to enjoyments, nor to life itself. I cast aside this body for the sake of awakening — for the welfare of beings.")

He paused. Then he said the second half, which the older commentaries preserve and which is one of the most quoted Bodhisattva-vows in the Mahayana tradition:

"यथा यथा हि सत्त्वानां दुःखं तीव्रतरं भवेत्। तथा तथा करुणा मे प्रवर्धतां जन्मनि जन्मनि॥" (yatha yatha hi sattvanam duhkham tivrataram bhavet / tatha tatha karuna me pravardhatam janmani janmani — "However sharp the suffering of beings becomes, by that much let my compassion grow, in birth after birth.")

Then he stepped off the stone.

He fell. He struck the rocks at the cliff's base. The fall did not kill him cleanly — the Bodhisattva, the texts say, knew it would not, and chose this on purpose, because the tigress was too weak to come to him; he had to bleed enough that she could smell him and crawl.

He lay broken at the cliff's base. The blood ran out into the moss.

The tigress lifted her head. She smelled it. She gathered the last strength in her body and crawled — slowly, painfully — across the clearing to him. She reached him. She drank.

The blood gave her strength enough to eat. She ate. The cubs, sensing their mother's body warming, came stumbling on their tiny legs and pressed against her belly. Milk began to come. The cubs nursed.

By the time the two elder brothers, sick with worry, ran back into the clearing — they had waited only a quarter of an hour at the eastern edge before turning around — they found the tigress feeding her cubs and Mahasattva's body cradled in the moss, his face turned up to the sky, his eyes closed, a small smile on his mouth.

The grief of the kingdom

The two brothers carried Mahasattva's remains back to the palace. The king and queen, when they were told, did not believe it at first. The queen ran to the gorge and would not be stopped — and when she saw the tigress and her cubs, alive, sitting where her son had bled, she did not curse them. She knelt. She touched the tigress's head. The tigress did not move away.

The king built a great stupa over the place — a stupa that, the chronicles say, still stood centuries later, that the Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited and described, that Xuanzang in the seventh century found in ruins but with the inscription still legible. The site was called Namo-Buddha — "Hail to the Buddha-to-be" — and the Tibetan and Newari traditions hold the same place, on a hill east of Kathmandu, as the place where the prince fell. Pilgrims still climb there.

The two elder brothers, when they were old, would tell their grandchildren the story. They would say: "We are the brothers who walked away. He is the brother who turned back. We were not equal to him. But we were his brothers, and we are honoured to have heard the words he said before he stepped off the rock. We carry them. We pass them on."

What the Buddha said when he told this story

When the Buddha told this birth-story to his disciples, sitting at Jeta's grove many lifetimes later, he said three things.

The first thing he said was: "Disciples — that prince was I. The tigress, in this present life, is the woman Mahaprajapati Gotami who became my foster mother. The cubs are five of you who sit before me now."

The second thing he said was about his brothers — for the disciples asked: "Lord, were the elder brothers wrong to walk away?"

The Buddha said: "They were not wrong. They walked away because they could not bear to watch. That is human. The Bodhisattva does not blame them. He does not need them to be like him. He needs only to be himself, fully, in the moment of the choice."

The third thing he said was the deepest. He said: "The teaching of this birth is not 'give your body to tigresses.' Few of you will meet a tigress in a clearing. The teaching is this — wherever you are, in whatever clearing, when you see suffering and you have something to give, the Bodhisattva does not weigh the giving. He does not ask whether the receiver deserves. He does not ask whether the cost is too high. He sees the suffering. He moves toward it. The body and its preferences are not the master. The seeing of the suffering — and the answering of it — is the master."

The disciples sat in silence. After a long while one of them said: "Lord — we cannot do that yet."

The Buddha smiled. "I could not do it for many lives either. The tigress was not the first time. The dove was not the first time. Each life I gave a little more. By the time of the tigress, my body had become a thing I could put down without trembling. You are early in the path. Begin with the giving you can give. The body will follow, eventually. It always follows the heart."

A young prince walked into a gorge once, on a quiet afternoon, and did not come out. The five cubs grew up. The tigress lived. The world is what it is partly because of what he did in that quarter of an hour when his brothers had gone ahead and the forest was very quiet.

We carry his vow forward in our small clearings. Yatha yatha hi sattvanam duhkham tivrataram bhavet, tatha tatha karuna me pravardhatam janmani janmani. However sharp the suffering becomes — by that much let our compassion grow.