The king ordered the honey to be given to the man and he went off with it to the pleasaunce, where he first anointed with the honey the grass at the spots frequented by the antelope, [158] and then hid himself. When the antelope came and tasted the honied grass it was so snared by the lust of taste that it would go nowhere else but only to the pleasaunce. Marking the success of his snare, the gardener began gradually to show himself. The appearance of the man made the antelope take to flight for the first day or two, but growing familiar with the sight of him, it gathered confidence and gradually came to eat grass from the man's hand. He, noting that the creature's confidence had been won, first strewed the path as thick as a carpet with broken boughs; then tying a gourd full of honey on his shoulder and sticking a bunch of grass in his waist-cloth, he kept dropping wisps of the honied grass in front of the antelope till at last he got it right inside the palace. No sooner was the antelope inside than they shut the door. At sight of men the antelope, in fear and trembling for its life, dashed to and fro about the hall; and the king coming down from his chamber above, and seeing the trembling creature, said, "So timid is the Wind-antelope that for a whole week it will not revisit a spot where it has so much as seen a man; and if it has once been frightened anywhere, it never goes back there again all its life long. Yet,

ensnared by the lust of taste, this wild thing from the jungle has actually come to a place like this. Truly, my friends, there is nothing viler in the world than this lust of taste." And he put his teaching into this stanza:--

There's nothing worse, men say, than taste to snare,
At borne or with one's friends. Lo! taste it was
That unto Sanjaya deliver'd up
The jungle-haunting antelope so wild.

And with these words he let the antelope go back to its forest again.

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[159] When the Master had ended his lesson, and had repeated what he had said as to that Brother's having fallen into that woman's power in bygone days as well as in the present time, he shewed the connexion and identified the Birth, by saying, "In those days this slave-girl was Sanjaya, Direct-alms the Less was the wind-antelope, and I myself was the King of Benares."

Footnotes

^44:1 See Ratthapala-sutta in the Majjhima-Nikaya (No. 83), translated in the Ceylon R. A. S. Journal, 1847. See also Vinaya, Vol. III. pages 13 and 148.

^44:2 These are meritorious ascetic practices for quelling the passions, of which the third is an undertaking to eat no food except alms received direct from the giver in the Brother's alms-bowl. Hence "ticket-food" (Jataka [*No. 5]) was inadmissible.

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