Sīhacamma Jātaka

Jataka No. 189 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning Kokalika, a monk whose confident manner concealed far less genuine attainment than it seemed to promise. Kokalika had boasted that he would recite the scriptures before the Sangha if asked, and the monks took him at his word. He dressed with care and took his seat on the Dhamma Seat, but as he began he broke into a sweat and grew embarrassed. He could recall only the opening line and then went blank, and he rose in confusion and left the assembly, while a more capable monk finished the recitation. His true measure, like the creature in this old story, revealed itself the moment real pressure was applied. When the monks spoke of it in the Dhamma Hall, the Buddha arrived, heard them, and told a story of the past.

In that former life, when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a family of honest farmers in a prosperous village. An itinerant merchant who traveled from hamlet to hamlet selling cheap goods had acquired a lion's skin, complete with mane and claws. He devised a scheme to let his own aging donkey graze for free. Wherever he stopped on his rounds, he unloaded the donkey's pack, draped the skin over the animal, and let it loose in the villagers' own barley and rice fields to feast.

Watchmen and farmers who saw what looked like a lion devouring their grain fled rather than risk confronting it. The disguised donkey gorged on sweet barley and ripe wheat day after day, growing plump on fields its owner had done nothing to earn the right to graze.

One morning, while the merchant was cooking his breakfast in a village, he turned his donkey loose in a field of barley, still wearing the lion's skin. The watchmen who saw it took it for a lion and did not dare go near. They ran to the village and raised the alarm.

The villagers came out in a crowd with conches and drums and made a great din around the field. Nothing was planned beyond that: they were frightened, and they made all the noise they could.

Alarmed by the uproar, the donkey forgot its borrowed majesty entirely and brayed aloud. In an instant it gave away everything the lion's skin had been hiding.

The Bodhisatta, who was a farmer among the villagers, knew the sound at once and spoke a verse: this is not the roar of a lion, a tiger or a leopard, but a worthless donkey braying, wrapped in a lion's skin.

When the villagers saw it was only a donkey, they beat it until its bones were broken and took the lion's skin away. The merchant came and found his donkey dying. He spoke a verse of his own: it might have gone on eating the green barley for a long time under the lion's skin, but its braying undid everything. As he finished speaking, the donkey died, and he went on his way.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the donkey with Kokalika, and the wise farmer with himself. Borrowed confidence, however convincing it appeared from a distance, carried exactly the same risk the donkey had carried beneath its skin. The moment a fright or a test brought a genuine voice to the surface, no disguise could keep standing what had never actually been there to begin with.

What exposed the disguise in the end was nothing the villagers had planned. It was the donkey's own voice, once the din frightened it into using it. A lion's skin could cover a donkey's shape for a long season, but it had never once been able to cover a donkey's bray. The Bodhisatta's part was only to recognize the sound for what it was and to say so plainly, which is the quiet work of wisdom in any village.