Lion and Jackal

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as a lion of great strength and patience; a jackal who attaches himself to the lion as a servant and companion, growing fat and proud on scraps of the lion’s kills.
• Setting: A cave in the Himalayan forests, in the time when the Bodhisatta took birth among animals; from the Pali Jataka collection.
• The turn: The jackal, swollen with pride from eating a lion’s food, declares he will hunt and kill an elephant himself.
• The outcome: The jackal leaps at the elephant, misses, and is crushed beneath its foot. The lion finds the jackal’s body and understands what happened.
• The legacy: The story entered the Jataka canon as a teaching on the danger of pride gained through another’s strength - the jackal’s broken body at the foot of the elephant became a fixed image in Buddhist sermon tradition.

The lion had killed a buffalo. He ate the best of it - the liver, the haunches, the meat along the spine - and when he was done he walked to the stream and drank and did not look back. What remained on the carcass was still more than most animals would eat in three days.

The jackal had been watching from the rocks. He came down carefully, checked the wind, checked the treeline, and when he was sure the lion had gone to water, he fed. He fed well. The ribs of the buffalo were still warm.

The Jackal at the Cave

This became their arrangement, though the lion had not proposed it and the jackal had not asked. The lion killed. The lion ate. The lion left. The jackal came after and took what was left. At first the jackal kept his distance - a hundred paces, then fifty, then ten. By the end of the first month he was waiting openly at the edge of the clearing while the lion fed, sitting on his haunches with his tongue out, watching the blood run.

The lion did not mind. He had more than he needed. A lion’s kill feeds a lion, and what feeds a lion could feed four jackals. The Bodhisatta, for it was he who had taken birth in that lion’s body, saw no harm in it. The jackal was thin when he arrived, his ribs showing through patchy fur, his muzzle scarred from fights over scraps with other jackals. Let him eat.

The jackal ate. He ate buffalo and deer and wild pig and once a young elephant that the lion had brought down at the river crossing. He ate until his belly hung low and his coat grew thick and his eyes took on a shine they had never had before. He slept in the outer chamber of the lion’s cave, which was dry and sheltered from the monsoon rains. He drank from the lion’s stream. He walked the lion’s paths through the forest, and the other animals - the smaller ones, the ones who would have chased a lone jackal - moved aside, because where the jackal walked the lion was not far behind.

The Jackal’s Teeth

The jackal began to believe a thing that was not true.

He had always been clever. Jackals are clever. But cleverness, when it is fed on another creature’s strength, begins to curdle into something else. The jackal looked at his reflection in the stream and saw a thick neck and bright eyes and teeth that had grown strong on good meat. He thought: I am not the same jackal who came to this forest. He thought: I have changed. And because he could not see the lion’s strength as separate from his own - because he had stood so close to it for so long - he began to feel that some of it had passed into him.

He said to the lion one evening, as they sat at the mouth of the cave while the light went out of the sky:

I could hunt, you know. I could kill what you kill.

The lion looked at him. The lion’s eyes were amber and flat and patient.

You are a jackal, the lion said.

I am not the jackal I was, the jackal said. Look at me. I am strong now. My teeth are strong. I could bring down a deer. I could bring down a buffalo.

The lion said nothing for a long time. Then he said:

You have eaten well. That is not the same as being strong. A jackal who eats a lion’s food is still a jackal.

The jackal heard this and did not believe it.

The Elephant on the Ridge

Three days later the jackal saw an elephant on the ridge above the river - a bull elephant, old and heavy, walking the high path alone. The jackal watched it and his heart beat fast. He had eaten elephant meat. He had crunched elephant sinew between his teeth. He had tasted elephant blood where it pooled in the grass after the lion’s kill. He knew the smell and taste and texture of elephant, and this knowledge felt, to him, like mastery.

He did not tell the lion. He went alone, at a run, up the slope through the sal trees, circling to get above the elephant on the ridge. He could hear the elephant’s breathing - slow, enormous, like wind moving through a cave. He could see the grey folds of its skin, the cracked mud on its legs, the small eye turning.

The jackal leaped.

He leaped the way he had seen the lion leap - from above, aiming for the neck, reaching with his forepaws for a hold on the great sloping head. But a jackal is not a lion. A jackal weighs what a lion’s forelimb weighs. The jackal’s claws, which were sharp enough for rabbits and ground-birds, skidded across the elephant’s hide and found no purchase.

The elephant did not panic. It did not trumpet. It shook its head once, the way it might shake off a fly, and the jackal fell. He hit the ground on his side at the elephant’s feet. Before he could stand the foot came down.

The Broken Body

The lion found him at dusk. The jackal was dead in the dirt at the base of the ridge, his body pressed flat where the elephant had stepped on him and then stepped on him again, not out of malice but out of the simple mechanics of a large animal walking forward. The elephant was gone. The sal trees were quiet. Ants had already begun their work along the jackal’s jaw.

The lion stood over the body for some time. He had warned the jackal. He had said the words plainly, because the Bodhisatta, in whatever form he wore, said things plainly. But the jackal had not heard, or had heard and had chosen the sound of his own voice over the lion’s.

The lion went back to his cave. He hunted the next day, and the day after that. No jackal came to eat the scraps. The carcasses lay where he left them, and the vultures and the smaller scavengers found them, and the forest continued in its ordinary way.

The jackal had mistaken proximity for possession. He had stood in the lion’s shadow so long he thought the shadow was his own. And when he stepped out of it, into the open ground where the elephant walked, there was nothing under him but what had always been there - a jackal’s weight, a jackal’s reach, a jackal’s small and insufficient bones.