Vinīlaka Jātaka

Jataka No. 160 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha at Veluvana when Sariputta and Moggallana returned from Gayasisa, where Devadatta had tried to imitate the Buddha and been ruined. The Buddha said it was not the first time Devadatta had come to ruin by imitating him, and told of the bird called Vinilaka. Long ago the Bodhisatta was a prince of Videha, born in Mithila, and he inherited the kingdom when his father died. At that time the king of the golden geese had paired with a crow at a feeding ground, and they had a son who looked like neither parent. He was dingy blue-black, so they named him Vinilaka, the Dingy One. He was an outcast, belonging fully to neither of the worlds he had been born into.

The goose-king often visited his son, and his two other sons, both pure golden geese, noticed their father's frequent trips toward the haunts of men. He told them that Vinilaka and the crow lived on a palm tree near Mithila. The brothers warned that humans meant danger, and they offered to bring the young bird to their father instead.

Because Vinilaka could not make such a flight alone, the two brothers held a stick in their beaks, set him upon it, and flew with him toward the mountains, carrying him entirely on the strength of their own wings.

As they flew over Mithila, King Videha was riding in a splendid carriage drawn by four milk-white thoroughbred horses, circling the city in procession. Looking down from his aerial perch, Vinilaka compared the two rides and was overcome by conceit.

Puffed up with arrogance, Vinilaka spoke a verse boasting that he too was being carried by a fine team, just as the king below was drawn by his horses, setting himself beside a king and treating his two bearers as draught animals.

The two young geese were angry at their passenger's insolence. Their first impulse was to drop him and leave him behind, but they feared their father's reaction, so they carried him on to the goose-king and reported everything.

Once they arrived, the two brothers told their father the entire incident, holding nothing back about what their passenger had said while riding on their own strength high above the city.

The father goose, the king of the golden geese, was furious. He asked Vinilaka whether he thought himself superior to his brothers, that he treated them like draught horses. He told the bird that he did not know his proper place and that this was not his home, and he spoke a verse of rebuke: the mountain pass was not for Vinilaka, who belonged at the village edge, which was his mother's nest.

The goose-king ordered his sons to take Vinilaka back to the dunghill outside Mithila, his mother's nest, and they did so.

In the Buddha's identification, Devadatta had been Vinilaka, the two elders Sariputta and Moggallana had been the two young geese, Ananda had been the goose-king, and the Buddha himself had been King Videha, who had seen the geese pass overhead.

What cost Vinilaka his place among the geese was never his mixed parentage, since the brothers had never held his birth against him when they first offered to carry him. It was the moment he mistook a gift freely given for a status he had earned on his own. He forgot that every inch of height he enjoyed belonged to the wings beneath him rather than to any wings of his own. The geese, though angry, brought the matter to their father rather than acting on a moment of fury high above the city, so that Vinilaka's fate came as a considered judgment on solid ground.