Kurungamiga Jataka

Jataka No. 206 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning Devadatta's enduring hostility. It recalled an old story of three forest friends and the hunter whose cruelty very nearly cost each of them everything, were it not for a rescue that did not stop the moment the most obvious danger had passed.

In that former life the Bodhisatta was born as an antelope living in a forest alongside two devoted companions: a woodpecker who nested in the branches above, and a tortoise who made his home in a nearby pool. The three met daily to share forest fruit and easy company, bound by a friendship that asked nothing of any one of them that the others would not also give in return.

A hunter tracking the antelope's trail through the forest set a hidden noose of cured rawhide near the fruit trees the antelope visited each morning. When the antelope stepped unknowingly into the trap, the leather snapped tight around his leg and held him fast no matter how hard he strained against it.

Hearing the antelope's cry of distress, the tortoise emerged from the pool and the woodpecker dropped down from his bough. Together the two decided at once how each could help. The tortoise would gnaw through the tough rawhide thong with his own jaws, while the woodpecker flew ahead to delay the hunter before he could ever reach the clearing.

Reaching the hunter's hut first, the woodpecker waited until the man stepped through his doorway and then flew directly at his face, screeching and flapping until the startled hunter retreated indoors, convinced he had met a bad omen. When the hunter tried the rear door instead, the woodpecker struck again, delaying him for hours through noise and persistence alone.

While the woodpecker harassed the hunter, the tortoise gnawed steadily at the rawhide thong. At last the final strand gave way, and the antelope sprang free into the thicket. This left the tortoise exhausted and slow from his long labor, exactly when the hunter finally broke free of the woodpecker's distractions and reached the clearing himself.

The antelope's own freedom should have ended the danger, but the exhausted tortoise, too worn out to reach the safety of the pool in time, was seized by the hunter before he could escape, turning what looked like a completed rescue into only half of one.

Rather than accepting his own safety as the end of the story, the antelope turned back toward the very danger he had just escaped. He deliberately drew the hunter's attention, luring him deeper into the forest on a chase the antelope alone was fast enough to survive. While the hunter followed the antelope's trail further from the clearing, the tortoise was quietly freed and returned to his pool unharmed.

Had the antelope simply vanished into the thicket once his own leg was free, the story would have been remembered as a tale of two friends saving a third. Instead it became a story of three friends who each, in turn, refused to let the rescue stop short of everyone's safety. The antelope's choice to return was never required by anything except the same friendship that had already cost the woodpecker his comfort and the tortoise his strength, and a friendship measured only by its easiest moments is not yet friendship fully tested.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the hunter with Devadatta, the woodpecker with Sariputta, the tortoise with Moggallana, and the antelope with himself. The friendship that once bound three forest creatures together through an entire rescue, start to finish, was the very same loyalty his own foremost disciples still carried toward one another and toward their own teacher, season after season, long after the first and most obvious danger had already passed.