Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c6.s3.86

c6.s3.86

More amazing and marvellous are the feats of the master-archer Jotipāla of the *Sarabhaṅga Jātaka*.¹ The same preliminary preparations are made. He has summoned for expert archers-men, who pierce like lightning (*akkhaṇavedhi*), able to split a hair (*vālavedhi*), and to shoot at a sound without seeing (*saddavedhi*), and to cleave a falling arrow (*saravedhi*), just as Asadisa did; he sets up a pavilion in a square enclosure in the palace yard, and at the four corners he stations the four archers equipped with plentiful of arrows. He himself stands in the middle with an arrow tipped with adamant (*vajiraggain nārācam*), and asks the four men to shoot him all at once. They begin to shoot their arrows simultaneously. But he strikes them severally with his own iron arrow, and makes them drop on the ground, and remains unhurt to the last. This is called the arrow-defence (*sarapaṭibāhanam*). Then to show that he can shoot the four men posted at the four corners, with a single arrow, he fixes four plantains (*kadaliyo*) at the four corners, and fastening a scarlet thread (*rattasuttakam*) on the feathered part of the arrow, he shoots it aiming at one of the plantains. The arrow strikes it, and then the second, the third and the fourth, one after another, and then strikes the first, which it has already pierced, and so returns to the archer's hand: the plantains stand encircled with the thread. This is called the ‘pierced circle’—*Cakkaviddham*. Other feats performed are: arrow-stick (*saralaṭṭhi*), arrow-rope (*sararajju*), arrow-plait (*saraveni*), arrow-terrace (*sarapāsāda*), arrow-pavilion (*saramandapam*), arrow-wall (*sarapākāram*), arrow-stairs (*sarasopānam*), arrow-tank (*sarapokkharanī*), blossoming the arrow-lotus (*sarapadumam nāma pupphāpesi*), and raining a shower of arrows (*saravassam*). Then again he cleaves seven incomparably huge substances, pierces a plank of fig wood, eight inches (*aṅgula*) thick, a plank of asana wood, four inches thick, a copper plate (*tambapaṭṭam*) two inches thick, an iron plate (*ayapaṭṭam*) one inch thick, and pierces a hundred boards (*phalakasatam*) joined together, one after another, shoots an arrow at the front part of wagons full of straw and sand and planks, and makes it come out at the back part, does the same thing from back to front; drives an arrow through a space of over a furlong (*usabhā*) in water, and more than two furlongs of earth, and last not the least, pierces a hair at the distance of half a furlong, at the first sign of its being moved by the wind.² All these were of course extraordinary performances (*asādhāraṇāni*) of skill, but not at all impossible. Art of hitting (*sakkharakhipanasippa*) was also a wonderful thing. A marksman cuts the foliage of a tree into various shapes asked for— an elephant or a horse for instance—by throwing stones after stones and he also through slit in the curtain right into the chaplains' gullet (*tālutalam*), one by one, like flies, (*sukkhā ajalaṇḍikā*).³