Seven hundred astrayed and exhausted travellers meet on their way an elephant, the Bodhisattva. They had been expelled from their country with 300 others who had died on the way.
By means of his trunk the elephant shows them the way to a stream where to quench their thirst and near which they will find a dead elephant whose meat will feed them. Along a shorter cut he speeds to the indicated spot, runs headlong into the bottom of a ravine and was smashed.
It is on this spot that the hungry wanderers find his dead body, and angels descend from heaven to sing his praise.
On 6 the exiles come across the elephant; on 7 we see them on their way to the place pointed out to them; on 8 the elephant is ready to fall into the precipice, and on 9 the saved ones worship the ashes of their rescuer.
I suppose this homage to the ashes closed in a tyaitya, as if it were to indicate a preceding cremation, should be taken in a symbolical sense only.
Second corner, 10, 11, 12 and 13 [W. L., 116, 117, 118 and 119].
This is one of the most important jâtakas.
As Sutasoma, a king’s son, the Bodhisattva was once walking with his wives in the garden of his palace when there entered a brahmin whom they invited to deliver a harangue about virtue. This harangue was unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of a monster who put all of them to flight, that is, with the exception of the prince himself. Another king had formerly procreated this monster by a lioness; most times he lived of human flesh only. Persecuted as he was by his own subjects after his father’s death he called in the aid of the demons and promised them a sacrifice of one hundred king’s sons. He now came to carry off Sutasoma to add him to the princes he already apprehended.
Sutasoma resolves to follow the lion’s son in order to convert him and to rescue the imprisoned princes. But on his arriving at the den of the violent monster he remembers that he left the brahmin unrewarded, and that he hasn’t wholly heard the latter’s preaching, and so he asks for permission to do that which he neglected; afterwards the man-eater could dispose of him.
The latter who has already gathered his 100 princes after all, releases his prisoner hoping to rejoice afterwards at the man’s fall as a person false to his word.