Bodhisat was re-born among the bird-kind as a hoopoe.[1] When grown up, he, in the Himâlaya region, made a pleasant nest, sheltered from the rain, and there took up his abode.
At that time, during the rainy reason, when there was a constant torrent-like downpour, a certain monkey came and sat not far off the nest of the hoopoe. The Bodhisat, seeing the ape thus wretched and forlorn, began to talk to him, and spake the following gâtha: —
"O woebegone ape, a man dost thou seem!
His feet and his hands, with head hast thou got,
What means thy sad plight? Oh, tell me, I pray,
The cause of your having no house of your own."
The monkey replied in the following gâtha:—
"'Tis just as you say, I do not say nay,
A man's feet and hands with head I possess.
But one thing I lack that all men much prize,
'Reason' they call it, but no 'reason' have I."
On hearing this, the Bodhisat spake the following gâtha:—
"Unstable of thought, both fickle and false!
No bliss can'st thou have, inconstant and frail!
Employ your wits well, your manners amend
And make thee a house wherein thou may'st dwell."
Then thought the monkey—"This fellow, because he sits in a nest of his own, sheltered from the rain, takes to reviling me. I'll have him out of it." Then he made a spring at the hoopoe, intending to lay hold of him; but the Bodhisat flew up, and went elsewhere. The monkey, also, after destroying the nest and reducing it to atoms, took his departure.
Inferior versions of this story occur in the Pañca-Tantra. vol i. p. 18, and Hitopadesa, bk. iii.
The moral is, "Advice leads to the exasperation, not to the tranquilisation, of fools."
- ↑ The Pâli has singila, which must be some sort of a crested bird.
