Kukkuta Jataka

The Buddha told this Kukkuta Jataka, No. 383 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana because of a monk who had glimpsed a richly adorned woman in the city and returned to the monastery restless with worldly longing. Seeing how shaken the monk had become, the Buddha told him that women who set out to deceive act very much like a certain cat once did, and then related the old story to show exactly what he meant.

The Buddha explained that a person bent on deception can cajole and flatter until the one they are deceiving is brought entirely into their power, just as the she-cat in the old tale had done to every bird in the forest except one. The comparison was meant to steady the monk's mind, not to condemn women in general, and the story that followed made its point through a single wise bird rather than through blame cast widely.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta (the being who would, after many more lives, become the Buddha) was born as a cock living in the forest, leading a flock of several hundred birds. He was watchful and quick-witted, qualities that would soon matter a great deal to his own survival.

A she-cat living nearby had found an effective way to feed herself on the flock. Rather than chasing the birds down by force, she deceived them one by one with clever tricks, catching and eating each in turn until she had worked her way through nearly the whole company. Only the Bodhisatta, more watchful than the rest, remained.

With every other bird gone, the she-cat turned her full attention to the one cock still perched safely above her reach. She went to the foot of the tree where he roosted and began the same work of deception that had already served her so well, confident that flattery would succeed where force could not.

Looking up at him, she called out that his bright wings and his gracefully drooping crest had won her heart, and that she would gladly become his wife without asking anything in return, if only he would leave his branch and come down to her.

When the cock did not move, she tried again, this time promising her youth and beauty, her pleasant speech and courtesy, and offering to serve him either as an honoured wife or as a humble slave-girl, whichever he preferred, so long as he came within her reach.

The Bodhisatta answered her plainly, pointing out the simple fact she hoped he would overlook: she walked on four feet and he had only two, and beasts and birds were never meant to marry one another. He told her to go and seek a husband of her own kind elsewhere.

When she persisted, the cock dropped the polite refusal and spoke the plain truth instead. He told her that she had already drunk the blood of his kin and robbed and slain them cruelly, and that there was no honour at all in a heart that could court him with one breath and feast on his family with the next. Shamed by being seen so clearly, the she-cat gave up and troubled him no more.

When the Buddha finished the story at Jetavana, he told the assembly only that the watchful cock who saw through every flattering word was himself in that former existence. The text does not assign the she-cat's part to any particular person in the monk's present trouble; her role was to illustrate a pattern of deceptive flattery in general, one the monk needed to recognize before it could work on him the way it had worked on so many birds in the forest.

Hearing how the cock's simple, unflinching honesty had stripped the she-cat's flattery of all its power, the troubled monk found his own longing for the woman he had seen beginning to loosen its grip. The Jataka records that he went on, strengthened by this teaching, to reach the fruit of the first path, carrying forward the same clear-eyed wisdom that had once let a single cock outlast an entire flock's worth of deception.