Gosh, I keep finding really clever things in the Jatakas. NGL, they are a lot more interesting and sophisticated than I anticipated.
Jataka 57 is titled Vānarindajātaka, the story of the “lord of vānaras".
First a bit of background. The vānaras are a monkey famed in Indian myth.
Their leaders, such as Sugrīva or Hanuman, are titled vānarendra, like the vānarinda of the Jataka.
You can read a description here:
In Indian art, they are often depicted as a kind of langur, whose characteristic sideburns lead to its being anthropomorphized.
Here’s Hanuman as a grey langur.
The story in the commentary tells us that a crocodile’s wife, being pregnant, conceived an irresistible craving (dohaḷa) to eat the heart of the monkey king. Her husband tried to satisfy her by pretending to be a rock in the river, but the monkey saw through his ruse.
https://ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Jataka/057.htm
This is one of a cycle of dohaḷa stories in the Jātakas, which deal with the ascension of consciousness driven by the unstoppable longing of a woman; I’ve written about this in my White Bones Red Rot Black Snakes. Here the ascension fails due to the crocodile’s greed and foolishness, so it cannot consume the monkey’s heart, i.e. intelligence.
The clever bit comes in the last line of the verse. This can be read two ways. The commentary gives a perfectly good reading that lines up with the story. But this relies on an obscure word meaning, rarely if ever found elsewhere in Pali. Using the much more common standard meanings in Pali we end up with a different and much more suggestive meaning. But that’s not the clever bit. The clever bit is that this secondary meaning is also wrapped up in the story itself.
The last line is:
diṭṭhaṁ so ativattati
The commentary explains diṭṭha as “foe” (Sanskrit dviṣṭa) and the phrase as “defeats the foe”. This would yield the following.
Whoever has these four qualities
like you, lord of langurs—
truth, principle, steadfastness, and generosity—
defeats their foe.
That’s a perfectly fine meaning, although we might notice that the four qualities, while standard in Buddhism, do not really play much of a part in the story.
Rather, it is the langur’s careful observation that saves him. He sees the crocodile pretending to be a rock, but senses that something is off. The acute vision of the monkey is deliberately contrasted with the crocodile, who, in order to catch the monkey as he leaps, must close his eyes as he opens his mouth. Thus the crocodile is dominated by greed, while the monkey is characterized by insight: brains beats brawn.
Now, if we return to this line:
diṭṭhaṁ so ativattati
Before checking the commentary, I translated it using the normal meaning of diṭṭha as “seen” and ativattati as “transcend”.
Whoever has these four qualities
like you, lord of langurs—
truth, principle, steadfastness, and generosity—
transcends the seen.
This hangs together well as a verse, because practicing these Dhamma qualities leads to escape from suffering, transcending the world of the senses. It also fits the story well, as the monkey saw beyond the “seen” and intuited that the rock was not what it appeared to be. They used their wisdom, and in doing so escaped being “seen” by the crocodile.
Told you it was clever!
Perhaps we can translate:
Whoever has these four qualities
like you, lord of langurs—
truth, principle, steadfastness, and generosity—
escapes the visible foe.
The following verse is similar and has a comparable background story, except here the dohaḷa motif is replaced by an Oedipal one—the senior monkey king fears his sons will kill him, so he castrates them with his teeth. Unable to do this to the Bodhisatta due to his strength, he sets him an impossible task, to retrieve lotus blossoms from a lake wherein lurks a vicious monster. As in the previous story, the langur’s keen eyesight lets him intuit, i.e. go beyond seeing, to recognize that the monster is there. So he retrieves the flowers by skipping over the lake and snatching just the blossom before he could get caught. Once again we have a nice metaphor for enlightenment and liberation by transcending the seen.
