Accordingly, when the Bodhisatta marked that it was crop-time, he sent for his two sons and said to them, "My children, it is now the time when crops stand thick in the fields, and many deer meet their death at this season. We who are old will make shift to stay in one spot; but you will retire each with your herd to the mountainous tracts in the forest and come back when the crops have been carried." "Very good," said his two sons, and departed with their herds, as their father bade.

Now the men who live along the route, know quite well the times at which deer take to the hills and return thence. And [144] lying in wait in hiding-places here and there along the route, they shoot and kill numbers of them. The dullard Blackie, ignorant of the times to travel and the

times to halt, kept his deer on the march early and late, both at dawn and in the gloaming, approaching the very confines of the villages. And the peasants, in ambush or in the open, destroyed numbers of his herd. Having thus by his crass folly worked the destruction of all these, it was with a very few survivors that he reached the forest.

Luckie on the other hand, being wise and astute and full of resource, never so much as approached the confines of a village. He did not travel by day, or even in the dawn or gloaming. Only in the dead of night did he move; and the result was that he reached the forest without losing a single head of his deer.

Four months they stayed in the forest, not leaving the hills till the crops were carried. On the homeward way Blackie by repeating his former folly lost the rest of his herd and returned solitary and alone; whereas Luckie had not lost one of his herd, but had brought back the whole five hundred deer, when he appeared before his parents. As he saw his two sons returning, the Bodhisatta framed this stanza in concert with the herd of deer:--

The upright kindly man bath his reward.
Mark Luckie leading back his troop of kin,
While here comes Blackie shorn of all his herd.

[145] Such was the Bodhisatta's welcome to his son; and after living to a good old age, he passed away to fare according to his deserts.

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At the close of his lesson, when the Master had repeated that Sariputta's glory and Devadatta's loss had both had a parallel in bygone days, he shewed the connexion linking the two stories together and identified the Birth, by saying, "Devadatta was the Blackie of those days; his followers were Blackie's following; Sariputta was the Luckie of those days, and his following the Buddha's followers; Rahula's mother was the mother of those days; and I myself was the father."

[Note. See Dhammapada, p. 146, for the above verse and for a parallel to the Introductory Story of this Jataka.]

Footnotes