As I continue to amble vaguely through the Jataka collection, I am finding some interesting things here and there. We know that the verses and stories go together, and the verses often make little sense without the story. But this doesn’t mean that the verses have always gone with these stories. In fact, it’s surely the case that the stories evolve and change.
In the case of Ja 15 and Ja 16 we have a pair of verses that belong together, but which have been treated as separate verses with independent, albeit similar, stories. In this case, the influence of the stories are such that the meaning of the verses has, I believe, been largely distorted and lost in the commentary and translations. Let’s work through them and restore them as a pair of verses telling a single story.
For the stories:
https://ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Jataka/015.htm
https://ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Jataka/016.htm
And for text and commentary:
https://ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Texts-and-Translations/Jatakagathavannana/015.htm
https://ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Texts-and-Translations/Jatakagathavannana/016.htm
And here’s the translation, in Anandajoti’s revised version which follows the commentary. The verses concern a deer who is being considered for training in the arts of illusion by which the deer keep themselves safe. The commentary takes both verses as being spoken by the Bodhisatta.
The deer has eight hoofs, Kharādiyā, and very crooked antlers,
I will not endeavour to advise him for more than seven times.The deer in three postures, with many tricks,
Using eight hoofs, and drinking at midnight,
Breathing through just one nostril on the ground,
(My) nephew beats (the hunter) in six ways.
rare vocabulary
One obvious feature is the extent of unusual or unique vocabulary, to whit:
- aṭṭhakkhuraṁ = “eight-hooved”, found only in these two verses
- kharādiye = ostensibly the name of the Bodhisatta’s sister (in vocative), this is found nowhere else. I explain my interpretation below.
- vaṅkātivaṅkinaṁ = “more wily than the wily”,
- tipallattha = “threefold collapse”, the three postures in which the deer throws himself down to play dead. Not found elsewhere in this sense.
- aḍḍharattāpapāyiṁ = “drinker at midnight”, another unique term.
- kalāhi = “tricks” (instrumental plural); the word kalā normally means “fraction”. It is attested in Sanskrit but not so far as I know in Pali in this sense.
- aitibhoti = “excels, overcomes”, this is a fairly common word, but not in this exact form.
That’s a lot. It tells us that the poet was having fun, playing with words, putting things in unusual and different ways. It’s reminiscent of the playful virtuosity of Vedic poetry rather than the more utilitarian flavor of most Pali verse.
Indeed, the fact that so many obscurities and conundrums present themselves in a verse about deer creating illusions suggests that the poet was consciously echoing his subject matter in his poetic choices. He’s been inspired by the deer to play tricks with us. And it alerts us to look out for things we may have missed.
formal play
It’s not just the vocabulary, for the poet is having fun with the sounds of words.
The opening line includes a notable chime. Recite it and it’s obvious:
Aṭṭhakkhuraṁ kharādiye
And when aṭṭhakkhuraṁ appears in the second verse, the poet double-chimes the other part of the word:
Aṭṭhakkhuraṁ aḍḍharattāpapāyiṁ
Very clever!
Another notable play is with the third line of the first verse:
Sattahi kālātikkantaṁ
and the last line of the second verse:
Chahi kalāhitibhoti bhāgineyyo
Both begin with a number in instrumental. The similarity is not merely formal, for these lines perform the same function in the two verses, but with inverted sense: the first says why he should be rejected (because he misses classes) and the second says why he should be accepted (because he’s really good at tricks). The poet is not just putting these plays in randomly; he is using them to highlight key moments of the verses.
The use of numbers is another distinctive shared feature.
- eight hooves
- seven times
- triple collapse
- countless (aneka) illusions
- midnight drinker (literally “half-night”)
- one nostril
- six tricks
These shared motifs in both vocabulary and form make it certain that the two verses were composed together. It seems that they would have originally created a mini-narrative, but were split up and the connections lost.
One point that divides the verses, however, is that they have different metres. The first is in eight-syllable siloka, the second in eleven-syllable tuṭṭhubha. These are both common metres in early Pali, so there’s nothing really remarkable about this. It seems the poet was playing with the metres, perhaps extending the line in the second verse to allow for more expansive persuasion. At the same time, they made sure to tie the verses together with other formal means: unity with variation, the pillars of artistic form.
things missed by the commentary
The commentary evinces a decided lack of curiosity. It wants to convey the purpose of the lesson—show up for classes on time, or your teacher will give up on you! Fair enough! It’s a good lesson! But once it’s explained a word it just leaves it there, so it leaves the verses somewhat bare of meaning.
The opening word aṭṭhakkhuraṁ is a good example of this. The commentary explains it correctly as meaning that the deer has a split or cloven hooves. But why is it used here? It’s the first word in the verse, and it’s repeated in the second, and appears so far as I can tell, nowhere else. Surely it has some importance? We’ll come back to it.
The second word is taken by the commentary as the name of the Bodhisatta’s sister in the background story. The elements of the background are rather implausible if taken literally, as you have basically the same events unfolding in apparently different lives in different places. Let’s leave that aside and just look at the word.
Ādiye means something like “you should accept”. As for khara, it most commonly means “rough, solid”. But in Sanskrit it’s also a word for “donkey, ass”, as in this sentence from Manu 4.115:
The Brāhmaṇa shall not read during a dust-storm, or while the sky is burning, or while jackals are howling, or while dogs or donkeys or camels are crying in a line.
Fascinating to see how they had a list of occasions when you got let off of school!
This makes good sense in this context. The ass is a solid-footed beast, and rather than referring to a sister of whom we know nothing, the poet is sparking interest in the story by opening with a deliberately comic contrast:
You should accept the eight-hooved ass
In the next line, the Pali says the deer is vaṅkātivaṅkinaṁ, which makes good sense in the context. He is being recommended as being super-tricky and full of wiles, as he continues to be in the next verse. We know from MN 51:4.14 or AN 8.13:1.11 that animals have ruses and wiles by which they escape human control. The text is respectful of these; it understands that the animals are clever and indeed assumes that they have to attend ruse-school to learn from their elders.
But the commentary has a problem here, because the story requires that it must be the Bodhisatta speaking, and he is also the one rejecting the deer in the next lines. So it takes vaṅka as a physical deformity. It says that vaṅka, literally “crooked”, here refers to the deer’s antlers, which are “crooked from root to tip”. This is unlikely, since vaṅka is not elsewhere used for antlers, but it is used for the tricks and ruses of animals, which is the main theme of these verses.
So far, in my reading, the first two lines have been spoken by an unnamed proponent of the young deer. The next two lines are by another speaker, who rejects the application. Notice that in my reading, the pairs of lines are balanced by the use of an optative verb in respectively second (ādiye) and first person (ussahe).
In the second verse, the commentary gets the word explanations mostly right, but I think there’s a few notable details to look into.
The “six tricks” of the final line seem to have confused the commentary, as it offers several different lists of six. But the six tricks have been stated in the verse:
- three ways of lying collapsed (as if dead)
- commentary explains as lying on either side, and straight down
- eight hooves
- sneaking drinks at midnight
- breathing through just one nostril (i.e. playing dead)
This raises the question, how is “eight hooves” a trick? I’m convinced that it is a trick, given how central it is to the verses, but I’m not sure exactly the sense. In the first verse, the idea seems to be that it can play at being a different animal, an ass in the form of a deer or vice versa. Perhaps it’s about the delicacy of the deer’s tread, as they step quietly and daintily? Or maybe about the footprints they leave? Anyway, I think it is a trick, and the commentary didn’t get it, hence it had to invent some other lists of six.
Then there’s a grammatical nuance that the commentary ignores, and which had me stumped for a while. Look at the forms in the second verse: the first two lines are in accusative with no verb, then the second pair are, as one might expect, in nominative with verbs. How are they referring to the same thing?
I think the first two lines are in what Wijesekera calls the “accusative of relation”, for which the canonical example is the phrase:
taṁ kho pana bhavantaṁ Gotamaṁ evaṃ kalyāṇo kittisaddo abbhuggato
a good reputation concerning that Mister Gotama has been spread about
The sentence is “concerning” or “about” what is set in accusative. This creates a more finely articulated structure for the verse, which we can bring forward in the translation.
The final word in the second verse is bhāgineyyo. This is a common word in the sense “nephew”. From here, I believe the commentary has back-inferred that kharādiye is a proper name, that it refers to his sister, and from there the whole framework of the two stories is derived. It even cites an opinion that bhoti in the final line is regarded by some as a term of address to the sister (rather than the more obvious reading atibhoti).
But what if this was all a mistake? We know that the poet loved to use rare or invented words. I think we can more plausibly trace bhāgineyyo to bhāgin, “one who has a share”, with the secondary derivation ending eyya, by analogy with dakkhiṇeyyo (“one worthy of priestly donation”), yielding the sense “one who deserves a chance”.
This creates a nicely articulated narrative to the whole thing. The first two lines and the second verse are spoken by the proponent of the student deer, who is making a consistent argument that their protege is indeed tricky and wily enough to be accepted. The teacher is reluctant, due to the deer’s inability to be punctual, but the proponent presses the case.
Underlying this tension is the rather witty idea that if you’re going to run a ruse-school for an infamously flighty animal, you can’t expect that they won’t try their ruses on you! And, given that this is an analogy for teaching classes of young students, it is rather charmingly suggesting, don’t give up on teenagers just because they are messing about, because that rebelliousness and playfulness is the source of their creativity, and it’s super-useful for surviving in the real world.
“Please accept the eight-hooved ass,
the deer more wily than the wily.”
“He has skipped the appointment seven times—
I’ll make no effort to instruct him.”“About that deer—triply collapsed with many illusions,
eight-hooved, a midnight drinker—
he’s breathing on the ground through one nostril!
Excelling with these six tricks, he deserves a chance.”
