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

A tigress in a clearing

The youngest prince saw her first. She was lying on her side at the foot of a cliff, her ribs showing through her coat, her tongue dark and dry. Five newborn cubs were pressing against her belly trying to nurse, but she had no milk. Her body had been emptied by hunger.

She turned her head as the three princes watched. She looked at her own cubs. And 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 three brothers were the sons of the king of Maharatha. They had gone walking that afternoon into the inner gorge of a forest park where few visitors went, telling their attendants to wait. The eldest two were named for greatness in the old style, but the youngest had been called Mahasattva, the Great Being, 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.

He was listening now.

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. 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 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. 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 climbed 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:

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.

न मे काये स्पृहा कापि न च भोगेषु जीविते। बोधाय हि शरीरं इदं त्यजामि सत्त्वहिताय वै॥

He paused. Then he said the second half, one of the most quoted vows in the Mahayana tradition: 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.

यथा यथा हि सत्त्वानां दुःखं तीव्रतरं भवेत्। तथा तथा करुणा मे प्रवर्धतां जन्मनि जन्मनि॥

Then he stepped off the stone.

He fell. He struck the rocks at the cliff's base. The fall did not kill him cleanly. He had chosen 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 queen, when she came, did not curse the tigress. She knelt beside her and laid one hand on her head. The tigress did not move away.

The king built a stupa over the place. The chronicles say it still stood centuries later, that the Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited and described it, that Xuanzang in the seventh century found it in ruins but with the inscription still legible. The site is called Namo-Buddha, hail to the Buddha-to-be, and stands on a hill east of Kathmandu. Pilgrims still climb there.

The Buddha, telling this birth-story many lifetimes later at Jeta's grove, said only that he had given a little more in each life until, by the time of the tigress, his body had become a thing he could put down without trembling. Few of us will meet a tigress in a clearing. But every life has its clearing. The seeing of the suffering, and the answering of it, is the path.