Maṁsa Jātaka

This jataka of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning Sariputta, one of his chief disciples. Monks seeking medicinal food for the sick had found that a respectful, friendly manner of asking succeeded far more often than a blunt or commanding one. To show that this held true in an older life as well, the Buddha recalled a story of four youths and a hunter they met on the road to Benares.

In that former life, a hunter made his living bringing venison down from the distant foothills to sell in the markets of Benares. One afternoon his heavily laden cart came rolling along the highway just as the Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be, in this earlier birth) and three young companions happened to be walking the same road, each of them hoping to beg a portion of meat for their own table.

The first youth strode up to the cart and demanded his share roughly, with no courtesy at all in his tone. The hunter halted his oxen, looked at him calmly, and answered that speech as harsh and coarse as his had been would be matched by a portion just as worthless. He tossed him a tough scrap of gristle and bone.

The second youth approached and addressed the hunter as a brother, asking gently for a portion of the venison. The hunter answered that brothers share one another's burdens the way joints share the weight of a single body, and handed him a solid, meaty joint in keeping with the warmth of his address.

The third youth called the hunter father and asked just as warmly for a share. The hunter answered that a father's name stirs an affection deeper than any other. He gave the youth a choice portion of breast meat and tender fat, a gift matched to the tenderness of the word that had called it forth.

The Bodhisatta came forward last, bowed with genuine courtesy, and addressed the hunter simply as a trusted friend, wishing him good fortune on his journey before asking for whatever portion he could spare. The hunter was moved beyond anything the earlier requests had stirred in him. He set down his reins and declared that nothing in the world was more sacred than true friendship, between which no dividing line or withheld possession could rightly exist. He gave the Bodhisatta the entire cart, its venison, and the oxen that drew it.

The Bodhisatta accepted the hunter's gift graciously, brought him home as an honored guest, and rewarded him with wealth worth far more than the venison itself had ever been. Moved in turn by the hunter's own generosity, the Bodhisatta spoke to him gently of the Dhamma, the Buddha's teaching. The hunter, his heart already softened by the day's exchange, set aside his bow and turned toward a life that no longer depended on the taking of any creature's life.

Nothing about the hunter's cart or the venison inside it changed across the whole afternoon. What changed, each time, was only the manner in which a request was made. The portion returned to each youth mirrored that manner so precisely that the four results together read less like four separate strokes of luck than like a single, consistent law about how speech shapes what comes back in answer to it.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the hunter of that old road with Sariputta. The very quality which had once turned a stranger's request for meat into the gift of an entire cart, he showed, was the same quality his own foremost disciple still carried toward every being who came to him seeking help. It made no difference whether the request concerned a portion of venison or medicine for the sick.

The monks who had first prompted this story through their own success in asking gently for medicine needed no further persuading. They had already heard how an entire cartload of venison once answered nothing more than a single well-chosen word. What the hunter gave each youth was never really about meat at all; it was a mirror held up to the manner each one had chosen to approach him. The Buddha let that mirror stand as the whole of his teaching, trusting his listeners to recognize their own requests reflected somewhere among the four.