Anta Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 295 of the Tikanipata's Kosiyavagga as recorded in the Pali Canon, after observing Devadatta, the monk who repeatedly opposed the Buddha, and his disciple Kokalika praising one another extravagantly before the laity in order to win donations, despite neither possessing the virtues the other claimed for him. The Buddha related a tale of a previous birth in which the same two characters had played out an identical pattern of hollow mutual flattery, though in far humbler form.

In the city of Benares, during the reign of King Brahmadatta, the Bodhisatta was reborn as the spirit of a castor-oil tree standing beside the path leading into a village. An old ox had died nearby, and a jackal came upon the carcass and began tearing at its flesh. Before long a crow flew down and perched in the castor-oil tree above him, eyeing the meal and calculating whether flattery might win her a share of it.

The crow addressed the jackal first, praising his body as being just like a bull's and his stretching just like a lion's, king of beasts. She offered him honor fit for royalty, though he was no more than a scavenger tearing at a corpse. Flattered and pleased, the jackal returned the compliment in kind, praising the crow's own form and inviting her down to share the carcass with him, and the two scavengers settled into the meal together, trading further extravagant praise between mouthfuls.

Watching this display from his place in the branches above, the tree spirit could not let the hollow flattery pass unremarked. He spoke a verse naming the truth of the scene outright. The jackal is the lowest of all beasts, the crow is the lowest of all birds, and the castor-oil is the lowest of all trees, and now these three lowest things had gathered together in one place. The verse's force lies in its final turn. The tree spirit does not exempt himself or his own tree from the judgment he pronounces, naming the humble setting alongside the two scavengers rather than speaking only from a position of superiority above them.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Devadatta had been the jackal, Kokalika had been the crow, and the Buddha himself had been the tree spirit who witnessed their hollow mutual praise and named it for what it was. The tale exposes a particular kind of deception distinct from flattery aimed at deceiving an outsider. Two parties, each aware on some level of their own low standing, nonetheless accept and return grand titles from one another simply because doing so costs nothing and flatters both.

Buddhist commentary reads the Anta Jataka as a caution against exactly the dynamic the frame story describes. Two people or factions prop up each other's reputations through reciprocal praise rather than through genuine virtue, each supplying the other with status neither could earn independently. The jataka's humor lies in how plainly absurd the flattery becomes once stripped of its presentation. A jackal gnawing a carcass is not thereby a lion, nor a crow pecking at the same carrion a king of birds, and the tree spirit's verse insists that such titles, however warmly exchanged, change nothing about what is actually taking place beneath them.

What distinguishes the tree spirit's verse from an ordinary rebuke is that it does not stop at exposing the jackal and crow while leaving the speaker above reproach. By naming the castor-oil as the lowest of trees in the same breath as the lowest beast and the lowest bird, the Bodhisatta places his own temporary dwelling inside the very judgment he pronounces. He refuses the easy posture of a superior critic observing lesser creatures from a position untouched by the scene below. This detail is central to the teaching's integrity. A rebuke of hollow flattery carries weight only when delivered without exempting oneself from the same honest accounting, and the tree spirit's willingness to name his own lowliness alongside the pair he corrects is precisely what keeps his verse from becoming one more instance of the very vanity it condemns.