The second great story of man and beast contained in the Mahabharata is that of Yudishtira and his dog. Accompanied by his wife and by his brethren, the saintly king started upon a pilgrimage of unheard-of difficulty which he alone was able to complete, as, on account of some slight imperfections that rendered them insufficiently meritorious to reach the goal, the others died upon the way. Only a dog, which followed Yudishtira from his house, remains with him still. At the final stage he is met by Indra, who invites him to mount his car and ascend to heaven in the flesh. The king asks if his brethren and the “tender king’s daughter,” his wife, are to be left lying miserably upon the road? Indra points out that the souls of these have already left their mortal coil and are even now in heaven, where Yudishtira will find them when he reaches it in his corporeal form. Then the king says, “And the dog, O lord of what Is and Is to be—the dog which has been faithful to the end, may I bring him? It is not my nature to be hard.” Indra says that since the king has this day obtained the rank of a god together with immortality and unbounded happiness, he had better not waste thoughts on a dog. Yudishtira answers that it would be an abominably unworthy act to forsake a faithful servant in order to obtain felicity and fortune. Indra objects that no dogs are allowed in heaven; what is a dog? A rough, ill-mannered brute which often runs away with the sacrifices offered in the temples. Let Yudishtira only reflect what wretched creatures dogs are, and he will give up all idea of taking his dog to heaven. Yudishtira still asserts that the abandonment of a servant is an enormous sin; it is as bad as murdering a Brahman. He is not going to forsake his dog whatever the god may say. Besides, it is not violent at all, but a gentle and devoted creature, and now that it is so weak and thin from all it has undergone on the journey and yet so eager to live, he would not leave it, even if it cost him his life. That is his final resolve.
Arguing in rather a feminine way, Indra returns to the charge that dogs are rough, rude brutes and quite ignores the good personal character given to this dog by its master. He goes on to twit Yudishtira with having abandoned his beloved Draupadi and his brothers on the road down there, while he makes all this stand about a dog. He winds up with saying, “You must be quite mad to-day.”
Repelling the disingenuous charge of abandoning his wife and brethren, Yudishtira remarks with dignity that he left not them but their dead bodies on the road: he could not bring them to life again. He might have said that Indra himself had pointed out to him this very fact. The refusal of asylum, the murder of a woman, the act of kidnapping a sleeping Brahman, the act of deceiving a friend—there is nothing, says Yudishtira, to choose between these four things and the abandonment of a faithful servant.
The trial is over and the god admits his defeat. “Since thou hast refused the divine chariot with the words, ‘This dog is devoted,’ it is clear, O Prince of Men, that there is no one in heaven equal to thee.” Yudishtira, alone among mortals, ascends to bliss in his own body. And the dog—what of the dog? One is sorry to hear that the dog vanished and in his place stood Yama, King of Death.
To us, far away from the glamour of Eastern skies, the god-out-of-the-machine or out of the beast-skin is not always a welcome apparition. We cannot help being glad when, sometimes, the animals just remain what they are, as in the charming Indian fable of the Lion and the Vulture. A lion who lived in a forest became great friends with a monkey. One day the monkey asked the lion to look after its two little ones while it was away. But the lion happened to go to sleep and a vulture that was hovering overhead seized both the young monkeys and took them up into a tree. When the lion awoke he saw that his charges were gone, and gazing about he perceived the vulture holding them tight on the top branches of the nearest tree. In great distress of mind the lion said, “The monkey placed its two children under my care, but I was not watchful enough and now you have carried them off. In this way I have missed keeping my word. I do beg you to give them back; I am the king of beasts, you are the chief of birds: our nobility and our power are equal. It would be only fair to let me have them.” Alas! compliments, though they will go very far, do little to persuade an empty stomach. “You are totally unacquainted with the circumstances of the case,” replied the vulture; “I am simply dying of hunger: what is the equality or difference of rank to me?” Then the lion with his claws tore out some of his own flesh to satisfy the vulture’s appetite and so ransomed the little monkeys.
In this fable we have the Hawk and the Pigeon motive with the miraculous kept in but the mythological left out.
Like a great part of the Buddhist stories of which the Lion and the Vulture is one, we owe its preservation to the industrious Chinese translator. In the same work that contains it, the Tatchi-lou-lun, we are told how, when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move till the eggs were hatched and the young birds had flown. The Buddha’s humanity is yet again shown by the story of how he saved the forest animals that were fleeing from a conflagration. The jungle caught fire and the flames spread to the forest, which burnt fiercely on three sides; one side was safe, but it was bounded by a great river. The Buddha saw the animals huddling in terror by the water’s edge. Full of pity, he took the form of a gigantic stag and placing his fore-feet on the further bank and his hind-feet on the other, he made a bridge over which the creatures could pass. His skin and flesh were cruelly wounded by their feet, but love helped him to bear the pain. When all the other animals had passed over, and when the stag’s powers were all but gone, up came a panting hare. The stag made one more supreme effort; the hare was saved, but hardly had it crossed, when the stag’s backbone broke and it fell into the water and died. The author of the fable may not have known that hares swim very well, so that the sacrifice was not necessary, unless, indeed, this hare was too exhausted to take to the water.
We can picture the first Buddhist missionaries telling such stories over the vast Chinese empire to a race which had not instinctively that tender feeling for animals which existed from the most remote times in the Indian peninsula. A good authority attributes the present Chinese sensitiveness about animals wholly to those early teachers.
A Sanscrit story akin to the preceding ones tells how a saint in the first stage of Buddhahood was walking in the mountains with his disciple when he saw in a cavern in the rock a tigress and her newly-born little ones. She was thin and starving and exhausted by suffering, and she cast unnatural glances on her children as they pressed close to her, confident in her love and heedless of her cruel growls. Notwithstanding his usual self-control, the saint trembled with emotion at the sight. Turning to his disciple, he cried, “My son, my son, here is a tigress, which, in spite of maternal instinct, is being driven by hunger to devour her little ones. Oh! dreadful cruelty of self-love, which makes a mother feed upon her children!”
He bids the young man fly in search of food, but while he is gone he reflects that it may be too late when he returns, and to save the mother from the dreadful crime of killing her children, and the little ones from the teeth of their famished mother, he flings himself down the precipice. Hearing the noise, and curious as to what it might mean, the tigress is turned from the thought of killing her young ones, and on looking round she sees the body of the saint and devours it.