Silava Elephant
At a Glance
- Central figures: The Bodhisattva, reborn as a royal elephant named Silava; a king of Benares; and the king’s forester, who betrayed the elephant’s trust.
- Setting: The forests and city of Benares, in the Jataka tradition of the Pali canon.
- The turn: The forester, lost in the wilderness, is rescued by Silava and carried to safety - then returns to Benares and sells the elephant’s location to ivory traders working for the king.
- The outcome: Silava, captured and brought to the royal stables, refuses to eat or drink, and the king - learning the cause of the elephant’s grief - releases him and punishes the forester’s ingratitude.
- The legacy: The story became one of the Jataka birth-tales illustrating the Bodhisattva’s perfection of patience, preserved in the Pali Jataka collection as a teaching on forbearance in the face of betrayal.
The forester had been walking for seven days. He had left the road to follow a deer trail, then lost the deer trail in a ravine, then climbed out of the ravine into forest he did not recognize. His water was gone. His feet were bleeding. He sat down at the base of a sal tree and wept, loudly, the way a man weeps when he believes no one can hear him.
Someone heard him. The ground shook, and through the trees came an elephant - enormous, white as a peeled root, with a face so calm it did not look like an animal’s face at all. The elephant stopped. It looked at the man. Then it knelt.
The Forester on the Elephant’s Back
The elephant’s name was Silava. He lived alone in that part of the forest, near a lake fed by a mountain stream, and he had heard the man crying from half a league away. He knelt and let the forester climb onto his back. The man was too weak to do it properly, so Silava curled his trunk around the man’s waist and lifted him.
For three days Silava carried the forester. He brought him water in his trunk. He found fruit trees and shook them until the branches dropped their load. At night he stood over the sleeping man so that nothing would come near. On the third morning they reached a road the forester recognized - the road that ran south to Benares.
Silava set the man down gently. The forester stood on the packed earth and looked up at the elephant. He put his hands together.
“You saved my life,” he said.
Silava watched him with eyes that were dark and still. Then the elephant turned and walked back into the forest. The forester watched until the white shape disappeared among the trees. He marked the direction carefully. He noted the position of the sun, the shape of the ridge, the tallest tree on the horizon. Then he walked to Benares.
The Ivory Traders
In Benares the king’s ivory carvers had put out word that they needed tusks - large ones, matched pairs, for the throne room of a new palace. The price was high. The forester heard the talk in the market and said nothing for two days. On the third day he went to the chief ivory trader and told him he knew where a great white elephant lived, alone, with tusks like temple pillars.
The trader brought the forester before the king. The king wanted the elephant alive - a white elephant was worth more than ivory. He sent a company of hunters with ropes and chains and a howdah for the capture. The forester led them.
They found the lake. They found the sal trees. They found Silava drinking at the water’s edge, his reflection white in the still surface. The elephant saw the men. He saw the ropes. He saw the forester standing at the front of the group, pointing.
Silava did not run. He stood where he was and let them come.
The Royal Stables
They brought Silava to Benares in chains. The king had prepared a stable hung with garlands, with troughs of rice and sugarcane and fresh water. Silava was led inside. The chains were removed. The garlands swayed in the warm air.
Silava did not eat. He did not drink. He stood with his head lowered and his eyes half closed, and he did not move. The mahouts offered him palmyra fruit, sweet grass, balls of rice soaked in honey. He turned away from all of it.
Three days passed. The king’s ministers grew worried. A dead elephant was worth nothing. A dying elephant was worse - it was an omen. They sent word to the king.
The king came to the stable himself. He stood before Silava and saw the bones beginning to show through the elephant’s hide, the dry trunk, the dull eyes. He spoke to the elephant as if the elephant could understand him - because in Benares, where the Buddha had once taught, people sometimes spoke to animals that way.
“Why won’t you eat?” the king said. “You have everything here. Rice, fruit, water, shade. What do you lack?”
Silava raised his head. He looked at the king. And then - because this was a Jataka, and because the Bodhisattva’s merit was such that speech came when speech was needed - the elephant spoke.
“I lack nothing you can give me. I had a life in the forest. A man came to me starving and lost, and I carried him to safety. That man led your hunters to me. I am not grieving for the forest. I am not grieving for my freedom. I am grieving because I helped him, and this is what he did.”
The King’s Judgment
The king was quiet for a long time. Then he turned to his ministers.
“Bring me the forester,” he said.
They brought him. The forester stood in the stable doorway, and when he saw Silava looking at him he could not meet the elephant’s eyes. He looked at the floor.
The king did not shout. He spoke in the same even voice he had used with the elephant.
“This creature saved your life. He carried you on his back. He fed you. He guarded you while you slept. And you sold him for ivory money.”
The forester said nothing. There was nothing to say.
The king ordered the stable doors opened. He ordered the chains brought out and laid at the forester’s feet - not to bind him, but so he would see them. He ordered Silava released.
Silava walked out of the stable, through the streets of Benares, past the market where the ivory traders watched in silence, through the southern gate, and back into the forest. He did not look back at the city. He did not look at the forester.
The king banished the forester from Benares. The decree was specific: any man who repays kindness with betrayal is not fit to live among men. The forester walked north, alone, into country he did not know.
The Lake in the Forest
Silava returned to his lake. He drank. He stood in the shallows and let the water run over his feet. The sal trees were the same. The mountain stream still fed the lake. Nothing had changed except that now, when he heard a man crying in the forest, he listened longer before he moved.
The Buddha, telling this story to his monks at Jetavana, said that the forester was Devadatta in a former life, and that the elephant was himself. He did not explain the moral. He did not need to. The monks had heard the elephant speak, and they understood what it cost him.