The Hungry Tigress

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisattva, in a former life as a prince named Mahasattva; a starving tigress and her cubs on a mountain cliff.
• Setting: A bamboo forest and mountain ravine in ancient India; from the Jatakamala of Arya Shura and the Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra (Golden Light Sutra).
• The turn: Prince Mahasattva, encountering a tigress too weak from starvation to feed her newborn cubs, chose to give her his own body as food.
• The outcome: The tigress and her cubs survived. Mahasattva died on the cliff and was reborn in a higher realm, his merit incalculable.
• The legacy: A stupa was raised over the site where Mahasattva’s bones were found, and the story became one of the most widely depicted Jataka tales in Buddhist art from Gandhara to Japan.

Three princes walked out of their father’s palace and into the forest. They were young, well-fed, talking about nothing. Their father was King Maharatha, and the kingdom was comfortable enough that the sons could spend a morning wandering bamboo groves without purpose. The eldest led. The middle followed. The youngest - Mahasattva - lagged behind, watching things the others did not watch: beetles on leaves, the movement of light between stalks.

They climbed. The bamboo thinned and the ground turned to rock and scrub. The path narrowed along a ridge above a ravine, and it was there, below them on a shelf of stone, that they saw the tigress.

The Tigress on the Ledge

She was enormous and she was dying. Her ribs showed through her coat like the frame of a boat. She lay on her side, and around her - pressed against her belly, mewling - were five cubs, days old at most, still blind. The cubs pushed at her for milk and she had none. Her jaw hung open. She panted without lifting her head.

The eldest prince stepped back from the edge.

“She will eat them,” he said. “When she is hungry enough, she will eat her own cubs.”

The middle prince looked away. He said they should leave. Wild animals were wild animals. It was not their concern.

Mahasattva said nothing. He stood at the edge and looked down at the tigress. She had not moved. One of the cubs had stopped mewling and lay still against her flank. He could not tell if it was dead or sleeping.

“Go ahead,” Mahasattva told his brothers. “I’ll catch up.”

They went. They did not argue, because Mahasattva often lingered. He was the youngest and the strangest, given to long silences. They assumed he wanted to watch the tigress a while longer.

The Thought That Would Not Leave

Mahasattva sat on the ridge alone. Below him: the tigress, the cubs, the dry stone. He thought about what his brothers had said. She would eat them. It was true. She was too weak to hunt. Too weak to stand. The cubs would die first, and then she would die, and the bones would bleach on the ledge until the monsoon washed them into the ravine.

He thought: What is this body for?

He had been born into comfort. He had never gone hungry. He had never been sick. His body was young and healthy and full of blood, and below him was a creature whose body had nothing left to give. She could not save her children. He could not carry her down the mountain. He could not hunt for her - there was no game on the ridge, and by the time he returned from the valley she would be dead.

He stood up. He removed his outer robe and hung it on a branch so his brothers might find it. He climbed down the cliff face toward the ledge. The rock was loose. He scraped his palms. He reached the ledge and stood three paces from the tigress.

She did not move. She did not even look at him. She was that far gone.

Mahasattva understood then that she was too weak to kill him. She could not open her jaws wide enough or fast enough to take prey, even prey that stood still. He would have to begin the work himself.

The Cliff

He climbed back up to the ridge. He stood at the edge and looked down - not at the tigress now, but at the rocks below her ledge, the sharp ones farther down the ravine. He steadied himself. He did not pray. He did not hesitate.

He threw himself off the ridge.

He struck the rocks below the ledge and his body broke open. The blood ran down the stone in a sheet. The tigress smelled it. She lifted her head for the first time. She dragged herself to the edge of the ledge where the blood pooled, and she drank. She drank until she had enough strength to move, and then she crawled down to where the body lay and she fed. She fed until her muscles came back and her milk came back, and she returned to the ledge and nursed her cubs, and the cubs lived.

The Brothers Return

The two elder princes waited at the edge of the forest. Mahasattva did not come. They went back along the ridge. They found his robe on the branch. They looked down into the ravine and saw the tigress below, moving now - alert, dangerous again, her cubs at her belly. They saw the blood on the rocks. They saw what remained of their brother, which was very little.

The eldest prince sat down on the ground and could not speak. The middle prince ran back toward the palace.

King Maharatha came with soldiers and servants. They descended into the ravine after the tigress had gone, carrying her cubs away into the deeper forest. The king gathered what was left of his youngest son - bones, cloth, hair - and he wept over them on the stone. He ordered a stupa built on the site. The relics were placed inside, and the stupa stood there for generations, marking the place where a prince had decided his body was worth less than a tigress and five blind cubs.

What Remained

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana, to a gathering of monks who had been arguing about the difficulty of generosity. He told them the prince on the cliff was himself, in a life so distant that the mountain had since worn down and the forest had changed species three times over.

He did not say the act was easy. He did not say they should do the same. He said: That was the Bodhisattva’s gift. He saw the need and he did not look away.

The monks were quiet. The argument about generosity did not resume.

The stupa in the ravine was rebuilt many times across the centuries - in Gandhara, where sculptors carved the scene into grey schist panels; in the cave temples of Central Asia, where painters gave the tigress golden eyes; in Japan, where the story was painted on silk and called Shashinmi, the sacrifice of the body. The image is always the same: a young man falling, a tigress below, five small shapes pressed against her side. The cubs are always blind. The prince is always already in the air.