The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c6.37

c6.37

The Bodhisattva in human form and animals. — In this last narrative the king of Benares gives a proof of good feeling : therefore he is presented to us as an ancient incarnation of Ānanda, the well-beloved disciple. In the four preceding fables man appears to us in the odious form of a hunter, except when he reveals himself as a monster of ingratitude, whilst the brute continues to show an example of the most difficult virtues. However, we must not be in too great a hurry to conclude that, in the Jātakas, the better part always belongs to the animals : in fact, it only falls to them when they incarnate the Bodhisattva. In other words, in the Buddhist adaptation to which these tales have been subjected the Bodhisattva has been incarnated in animal form only in those cases where it was decidedly more flattering to be beast than to be man. Here are four other examples which will abundantly prove to us that ingratitude, foolishness, the aggressive instinct, and dishonesty are not, in the minds of our authors, the privilege of humanity alone, as you might have been led to believe. The stories ought indeed to come a little later in the plan which we have adopted, since the Bodhisattva is there already clothed in the human form par excellence, I mean that of a man : but for the advantage of warning ourselves against a wrong idea it is worth while slightly to disarrange the hierarchical order of the sexes.