Chaddanta Elephant

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as Chaddanta, a six-tusked elephant king of enormous beauty and power; his two chief consorts, Mahasubhadda and Cullasubhadda; and a hunter named Sonuttara.
• Setting: The Chaddanta lake in the Himavanta forest, a great lotus-covered lake ringed by mountains, as told in the Pali Jataka collection (Jataka No. 514).
• The turn: Cullasubhadda, slighted by Chaddanta over a gift of flowers, nurses a grudge across lifetimes and is reborn as a queen of Benares, from which position she dispatches a hunter to cut the six tusks from the elephant king.
• The outcome: Chaddanta, recognizing the hunter’s purpose, kneels and helps saw off his own tusks rather than let the man struggle. He dies from the wounds. The queen, receiving the tusks, is destroyed by grief and dies that same day.
• The legacy: Chaddanta became one of the most depicted Jataka subjects in Buddhist art, carved on the railings at Sanchi and Bharhut, and remains a canonical example of the Bodhisatta’s perfection of generosity carried to its furthest possible limit.

The elephant had six tusks, each the color of different metals when the light caught them - silver, gold, and something between the two. He stood taller than the other elephants by a full head. Eight thousand elephants lived around the Chaddanta lake, and he was their king, and they followed him because he had always been there and because he was the largest and because when he walked into the water the lotuses parted ahead of him as though they knew.

He had two chief consorts. Mahasubhadda walked on his right side. Cullasubhadda walked on his left. He favored neither, or tried not to.

The Sal Flowers

One day during the spring flowering, Chaddanta walked beneath a great sal tree and struck its trunk with his forehead. The tree shook. Flowers and dry leaves and ants and bark all came down together. The wind was blowing from the right. So the flowers fell on Mahasubhadda, who stood on that side, and the dry leaves and ants and bits of bark fell on Cullasubhadda, who stood on the left.

It was the wind. Chaddanta had not chosen it. But Cullasubhadda looked at the flowers caught in Mahasubhadda’s hair and the dead leaves stuck in her own, and she understood the moment differently. She said nothing. She walked with the herd to the lake and bathed and ate lotus stems and said nothing to anyone about it for the rest of that life.

But she made a vow. She prayed - the kind of focused, bone-deep resolve that carries across death - that she would be born in a position of power, and that she would have those six tusks cut from his head.

She died. She was reborn as a human woman of great beauty in the city of Benares, and in time she became the chief queen of the king of Benares. She remembered everything.

The Queen’s Grief

The queen lay on her bed and would not eat. The king came to her. She told him she had dreamed of a six-tusked elephant, white as a mountain, and that she needed his tusks or she would die. The king, who loved her, did not ask why a woman would die for want of elephant tusks. He summoned his hunters.

She examined them one by one. She needed a particular kind of man - one skilled enough to track an elephant through the Himavanta forest, hard enough to kill what he found, and desperate enough to accept a task from which he would probably not return. She found Sonuttara. He was all three.

She told him where the lake was. She described the six tusks, the herd of eight thousand, the lotuses. She told him the paths through the mountains. She knew these things because she had walked those paths on four legs in another life, though she did not explain this to the hunter.

Sonuttara took his bow, his poison arrows, a sharp saw, and provisions for a long journey. He walked for seven years, or seven months, or seven days - the Jataka gives different versions and the point is the same: it was far, and he suffered getting there.

The Pit

When Sonuttara reached the Chaddanta lake, he could not simply walk up to the elephant king. Eight thousand elephants surrounded him at all times. So the hunter dug a pit along the path where Chaddanta walked to bathe each morning. He covered the pit with branches and leaves and sat inside it, wearing the saffron-dyed robes of a monk, with his bow strung and a poisoned arrow fitted to the string.

Chaddanta came down the path. The elephant king saw the saffron robe first - the color of renunciation, the color that means a man has given up harming - and he paused, because even an elephant born in the animal realm recognizes that robe and what it is supposed to mean.

The arrow struck him in the side, below the shoulder. The poison entered.

Chaddanta screamed. The other elephants charged toward the pit, ready to crush the hunter under their feet. But Chaddanta raised his trunk and stopped them. He looked at the man in the saffron robe, crouching in his hole with a second arrow half-drawn, and he did not kill him. He could have. He did not.

Who sent you?

Sonuttara told him. The queen of Benares. She wanted his tusks.

The Saw

Chaddanta understood then. He knew who the queen of Benares had been. He remembered the sal tree, the wind, the flowers falling on the wrong side. He remembered Cullasubhadda’s silence, which had been worse than anger.

He knelt. He lowered his great head to the ground so that his tusks rested on the earth in front of the hunter.

Sonuttara took his saw and began to cut. He was not skilled at this. The saw slipped. Blood came. Chaddanta’s mouth filled with it. The hunter’s hands shook and the saw jammed in the ivory.

Chaddanta wrapped his trunk around the saw and helped. He drew the blade back and forth across his own tusks, steadying it, guiding the cut, because the hunter could not do it alone and if the man returned to Benares without the tusks the queen would send another hunter and this would happen again to some other elephant.

The six tusks came free. Chaddanta lay on his side. The poison had spread through his body during the cutting, and the wounds in his jaw would not stop bleeding.

Sonuttara wrapped the tusks in cloth and left. Chaddanta died by the lake, among the lotuses, with the herd standing around him in silence.

The Tusks in Benares

Sonuttara carried the six tusks back across the mountains and laid them before the queen. She picked them up. They were heavier than she expected, or perhaps not heavy enough - six tusks from the largest elephant in the Himavanta, and they fit in her lap.

She turned them over in her hands. She had wanted this. She had burned for this across an entire death and an entire rebirth and seven years of a hunter’s journey. She held the tusks of the being who had once been her husband and her king, cut from his living jaw, stained at the base where the blood had not been wiped clean.

The queen of Benares pressed the tusks against her chest. Grief came up in her like water rising in a well - not satisfaction, not triumph, nothing she had imagined during the long years of wanting. She saw the sal tree. She saw the lotuses on the lake. She saw him kneeling, wrapping his trunk around the saw to help the man who was killing him.

Her heart broke. She died that day, holding the tusks.

The Buddha, telling this story to the assembled monks at Jetavana, identified himself as Chaddanta. He had been the elephant. He had helped with the saw. The monk to whom he told the story did not ask why. The answer was in the telling.