Ja 266 Vātaggasindhavajātaka
The Birth Story about the Thoroughbred Horse Vātagga (3s)
In the present one young woman falls in love with a householder, and her friends bring him to her. Playing hard to get she is unreponsive to his advances, and he leaves her never to return, which leads to her pining away. The Buddha tells a similar story from the past involving an ass and a thoroughbred horse.
The Bodhisatta = the (thoroughbred) horse Vātagga,
the woman = the female donkey (gadrabhī).
Keywords: Love, Rejection, Animals.
“He for whose sake.”
At Sāvatthi, we learn, a handsome woman saw this man, who was also handsome, and fell in love. The passion within her was like a fire burning her body through and through. She lost her senses, both of body and of mind; she cared nothing for food; she only lay down hugging the frame of the bedstead.
Her friends and handmaidens asked her what troubled her at heart that she lay hugging the bedstead; what was the matter, they wished to know. The first few times she answered nothing; but as they continued pressing her, she told them what it was.
“Don’t worry,” they said, “we’ll bring him to you,” and they went and had a talk with the man. At first he refused, but by their much asking he at last consented. They got his promise to come at a certain hour on a fixed day, and told the woman.
She prepared her chamber, and dressed herself in her finery, and sat on the bed waiting until he came. He sat down beside her. Then a thought came into her mind.
When the women found out what she had done, and that the man had gone off, they reproached her. “Here you are,” they said, “in love with somebody, and lie down refusing to take nourishment; we had great difficulty in persuading the man, but at last we bring him; and then you have nothing to say to him!” She told them why it was, and they went off; warning her that she would get talked about.
The man never even came to look at her again. When she found she had lost him, she would take no nourishment, and soon died. When the man heard of her death, he took a quantity of flowers, scents, and perfumes, and went to Jetavana, where he saluted the Teacher and sat on one side.
The Teacher asked him, “How is it, lay brother, that we never see you here?” He told him the whole story, adding that he had avoided waiting on the Buddha all this time for shame. Said the Teacher, “Layman, on this occasion the woman sent for you through her passion, and then would have nothing to do with you and sent you away angry; and just so in olden days, she fell in love with wise persons, sent for them, and when they came refused to have anything to do with them, and thus plagued them and sent them back again.” Then at his request the Teacher told a story of the past.
In the past, when Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisatta was a Sindh horse, and they called him Vātagga [Great Wind]; and he was the king’s horse of ceremony. The grooms used to take him to bathe in the Ganges. There a certain female ass saw him, and fell in love.
Trembling with passion,
Then her foal comforted her, saying: “Mother, do not be troubled; I will bring him to you.”
So when Vātagga went down to bathe, the foal said, approaching him, “Sir, my mother is in love with you: she takes no food, and she is pining away to death. Give her life!”
“Good, my lad, I will,” said the horse. “When my bath is over, the grooms let me go awhile to exercise on the river bank. Do you bring your mother to that place.”
So the foal fetched his mother, and turned her loose in the place; then he hid himself nearby.
The groom let Vātagga go for a run; he spied the female ass, and came up to her.
Now when the horse came up and began to sniff at her, thought the ass to herself, “If I make myself cheap, and let him have his way as soon as he has come here, my honour and pride will perish. I must make as though I did not wish it.” So she gave him a kick on the lower jaw, and scampered away. It broke his jaw, and half killed him. “What does she matter to me?” thought Vātagga;
Then the ass repented, and lay down on the spot in grief. And her son the foal came up, and asked her a question in the following lines:
1. Yenāsi kisiyā paṇḍu yena bhattaṁ na ruccati,
Ayaṁ so āgato bhattā, kasmā dāni palāyasī ti?
That by which you grew thin, yellow, and did not take delight in food, that master, he has returned, why at this time do you run away?
In this connection, by which means by which reason your mind was bound to him.
Hearing her son’s voice, the ass repeated the second verse:
2. Sace panādikeneva santhavo nāma jāyati,
Yaso hāyati itthīnaṁ, tasmā tāta palāyahan-ti.
If at the beginning itself what’s called intimacy arises, for women their fame is lost, therefore, my dear, I do run away.
In this connection, at the beginning means from the start, from the first.
Intimacy means there is friendly intimacy through being engaged in sexual intercourse.
For women their fame is lost, my dear, for women who have not given it importance, and from the start are intimate, their fame is lost, and their power diminishes.
In these words she explained the feminine nature to her son.
The Teacher, after Fully Awakening, repeated the third verse:
3. Yasassinaṁ kule jātaṁ āgataṁ yā na icchati,
Socati cirarattāya, Vātaggam-iva Bhaddalī ti.
Not desiring to come to one born in a renowned family, she will grieve for a long time, like Bhaddalī grieved for Vātagga.
In this connection, renowned means endowed with renown.
Not desiring means whatever woman has no desire for such a man.
For a long time means for a long time, for a long period.
When this discourse was ended, the Teacher declared the Truths and identified the Jātaka, at the conclusion of the Truths, this landowner entered on the Fruit of the First Path, “This woman was the female ass, and I was Vātagga.”