Sukara Jataka

The Buddha told this Jātaka, No. 153 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana because of an elderly monk. One evening, after the Buddha had finished a discourse and the Elder Sāriputta had taught further to the assembly, this old monk tried to challenge Sāriputta publicly, hoping to impress the four classes of disciples gathered there, monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen. Sāriputta refused to engage and quietly left his seat. The crowd then turned on the old monk and chased him from the hall, and in his flight he fell into a cesspool just outside the monastery, coming up covered from head to foot in filth. When the laypeople reported this to the Buddha, he told them that this same elder had acted with the very same foolishness in a birth long past.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as a lion dwelling in a mountain cave of the Himalayas. Not far off lay a lake, and around its shores lived a great number of boars, along with hermits settled nearby in huts of leaves, whose dunghill stood at the edge of their clearing.

One day the lion came down to the lake to drink. Seeing him, one boar watched the lion withdraw cautiously rather than approach directly, and mistook this wariness for fear. Puffed up with this misunderstanding, the boar called out to him: "You are a four-foot creature, and so am I; in that much, friend, we are alike. Turn around, lion — are you afraid? Why do you run from me?"

Rather than answer the challenge on the spot, the lion proposed that they meet in single combat seven days from that day, and the boar, delighted at having apparently cowed the king of beasts, agreed.

The boar returned to his kind and told them of his challenge, and the other boars, wiser in the ways of such contests, advised him on how to win it without ever landing a blow. Following their counsel, he went to the hermits' dunghill and rolled in it for seven days running, letting the filth cake and dry upon his hide, then dampening it again each morning with dew, until the stench clung to him thick enough to carry on the wind. On the appointed day, he made certain to arrive first and to take his place upwind of where the lion would stand.

When the lion arrived and the boar's smell reached him, he understood at once what trick had been played, and he answered the boar not with claws but with a verse of calm concession: "O filthy boar, your hide is foul, and the stench of you sickens me. If you would fight, then I yield you the field entirely — you have won, and I own your victory." With that, the lion turned and went off to hunt elsewhere, leaving the boar unharmed and unchallenged.

The boar hurried back to his herd, boasting that he had made the king of beasts flee before him. But his own kind took no comfort in the news; it only confirmed how dangerous the lion truly was, and in their fear the boars soon abandoned that stretch of country altogether and scattered elsewhere.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha revealed that the boar of that ancient birth was this same elder monk now covered in filth from the cesspool, and that he himself had been the lion who chose to walk away rather than be drawn into a contest fought on terms of disgust rather than virtue.

The Sūkara Jātaka does not pretend that the lion's withdrawal was a defeat; it shows instead that real strength is measured by what a being refuses to be dragged down into, not only by what it is willing to fight. Sāriputta's silence in the great hall and the lion's quiet refusal beside the lake are the very same act performed twice, centuries apart: a refusal to let one's own dignity be judged by terms a provoker has already made too foul for any contest to be fair.