"The Kurunga knows full well, Sepaṇṇi,
What kind of fruit you thus throw down.
Elsewhere I shall betake myself:
Your fruit, my friend, belikes me not."[1]
Then the hunter, seated as he was on the platform, hurled his javelin at him, calling out, "Away with you! I've lost you this time!"
The Bodisat turned round, and stopped to cry out, "I tell you, O man, however much you may have lost me this time, the eight Great Hells and the sixteen Ussada Hells, and fivefold bondage and torment — the result of your conduct — these you have not lost!" And so saying, he escaped whither he desired. And the hunter, too, got down, and went whithersoever he pleased.
"When the Teacher had finished this discourse in illustration of what he had said (" Not now only, O mendicants, does Devadatta go about to slay me; formerly, also, he did the same"), he made the connexion, and summed up the Jātaka as follows: "He who was then the hunter was Devadatta, but the Kurunga Antelope was I myself."[2]
END OF THE STORY OF THE KURUNGA ANTELOPE.
1 This verse is quoted by the Dhammapada Commentator, Fausböll, p. 147.
2 The Commentator on the "Scripture Verses" (p. 331), says that it was at the end of this story that the Buddha uttered the 162nd verse of that Collection — "He who exceeds in wickedness makes himself such as his enemy might desire, (dragging himself down) as the creeper the tree which it has covered."
