Virocana Jātaka

Jataka No. 143 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning Devadatta (a rival monk and cousin of the Buddha). Inflated with conceit by the offerings of Prince Ajatasattu (the king's son who later seized the throne), Devadatta declared himself equal to the Buddha and demanded leadership of the holy Sangha, a presumption that brought swift ruin upon himself.

In former days, when Brahmadatta was king in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was reborn as a majestic lion king inhabiting a cave in the mountains of the Himalayas. Whenever hunger stirred, he would emerge, fell a wild buffalo or deer, partake of the choice portions, and leave the remainder upon the crags for whatever scavenger happened to find it.

A hungry jackal met the lion by chance and, unable to escape, threw himself at the lion's feet and begged to be his servant. The lion agreed that he would feed on prime meat, and from then on the lion's leavings fell to the jackal. Lying in his den one day, the lion told the jackal to scan the valleys from the mountain top and, whenever he saw prey to his liking, to report it with due obeisance and the words "Shine forth in your might, Lord." At those words the lion would bound forth, slay the beast, and share the best of the carcass with the jackal.

Months passed, and dining on royal scraps, the jackal grew sleek, rotund, and glossy-coated. But with bodily fat came a poisonous conceit that had nothing to do with any real change in his own strength. One day he reasoned that he, too, had four legs, just as the lion did, and that there was therefore no reason he should live on another's bounty when he was surely just as capable of slaying an elephant himself. The lion, he decided, killed only because of the formula "Shine forth in your might, Lord." He would make the lion call out the same words to him, "Shine forth in your might, jackal," and then he would kill an elephant for himself.

The jackal is never given a name of his own in the story. The title Virocana comes from "shine forth," the words of the cue phrase he longed to have called out to him, and later from the lion's bitter verse, "today you did shine forth."

One morning the jackal went to the lion and, pointing out that he had long lived on what the lion had killed, said he wished to eat an elephant of his own killing. He asked that he be allowed to lie in the lion's corner of the den while the lion climbed the mountain to look for an elephant, and that the lion then return to the den and call out, "Shine forth in your might, jackal."

The Bodhisatta warned him plainly that only lions can kill elephants, and that the world had never seen a jackal able to cope with one. He urged the jackal to give up the fancy and go on feeding on what the lion killed.

But whatever the lion said, the jackal would not give way and kept pressing his request. At last the lion yielded. He told the jackal to lie in the den, climbed the peak, and there spied an elephant in rut. Returning to the mouth of the cave, he called out, "Shine forth in your might, jackal."

From the den the jackal bounded forth, looked around him on all four sides, and, raising his howl three times, sprang at the elephant, meaning to fasten on its head.

Missing his aim, the jackal alighted at the elephant's feet instead. The infuriated elephant raised its right foot and crushed the jackal's head, trampling the bones to powder, and then dashed trumpeting into the forest, ending the jackal's brief ambition in a single motion.

Seeing all this, the Bodhisatta said, "Now shine forth in your might, jackal," and spoke a verse: his brains were split open, his head smashed in, and all his ribs broken, and today he did indeed shine forth. He lived on to a good old age and passed away according to his deeds. The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the jackal with Devadatta and himself as the lion. The same fatal gap between imagined and actual capability had proven just as deadly when Devadatta tried to imitate a greatness that had never been his to claim.

What destroyed the jackal was never the elephant's strength alone, since the elephant had done nothing more than react naturally to something underfoot. It was the jackal's own refusal to recognize that eating a lion's scraps had never once made him a lion. Comfort borrowed from someone else's effort can feed a creature well for a long time, but it was never evidence of a capability the creature had not actually built for himself. Mistaking the two proved fatal the very first moment it was tested against something that could not be flattered or outrun.