The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c10.27

c10.27

In fact, if we recur to the written accounts which have been preserved to us, we remark that the protagonist adopts in turns one or other of these attitudes at the culminating moment of the narrative : « Rise, hunter, take thy knife (khura, Skt. kshura), and cut from me these teeth before I die », is the extent of what the elephant says in stanza 31 of the Jātaka ; and his interlocutor does not let him repeat the invitation. The Lieu tu tsi king considers it only right to add a little moral homily. But with the prose commentary of the Jātaka things become more complicated. The animal has attained a size so monstrous, that it is only with great difficulty that the man succeeds in raising himself up to the root of its tusks, and even there, though instead of the hatchet of a savage (the use of which would, in fact, have been disastrous to the ivory) he now uses a more perfect instrument, the saw (kakaca, Skt. krakaca), he vainly exhausts himself with cruel efforts : his victim himself must come to his aid. In order to make things more pathetic, the monastic editor does not recoil before the most flagrant contradictions. The elephant is already so weak that he cannot raise his silver trunk to take hold of the saw ; and he has to call all his senses together, in order to beg the hunter to give him the handle of it ; after which — as it is generally agreed that the Bodhisattva is by his very nature endowed with supernatural strength — he instantly saws through his two tusks (for here (') they are no more in number than two), like the tender stems of a