By and bye all this became known among the Brotherhood. One day they were talking about it in the Hall of Truth: "Friend, I hear that Brother So-and-so dropped filth in the face of that loafer, and left him!" The Master came in, and wanted to know what they were all talking about as they sat there. They told him. Said he, "Brethren, this is not the first time this brother attacked the man with dirt, but he did just the same before." Then he told them an old-world tale.

[211] Once on a time, those citizens of the kingdoms of Anga and Magadha who were travelling from one land to the other, used to stay in a house on the marches of the two kingdoms, and there they drank liquor and ate the flesh of fishes, and early in the morning they yoked their carts and went away. At the time when they came, a certain dung-beetle, led by the odour of dung, came to the place where they had drunken, and saw some liquor shed upon the ground, and for thirst he drank it, and returned to his lump of dung intoxicated. When he climbed upon it the moist dung gave way a little. "The world cannot hear my weight!" he bawled out. At that very instant a maddened Elephant came to the spot, and smelling the dung went back in disgust. The Beetle saw it. "Yon creature," he thought, "is afraid of me, and see how he runs away!--I must fight with him!" and so he challenged him in the first stanza:--

"Well matched! for we are heroes both: here let us issue try:
Turn back, turn back, friend Elephant! Why would you fear and fly?
Let Magadha and Anga see how great our bravery!"

The Elephant listened, and heard the voice; he turned back towards the Beetle, and said the second stanza, by way of rebuke:--

"Non pede, longinquave manu, non dentibus utar:
Stercore, cui stercus cura, perisse decet."

[212] And so, dropping a great piece of dung upon him, and making water, he killed him then and there; and scampered into the forest, trumpeting.

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When this discourse was ended, the Master identified the Birth:--"In those days, this lout was the dung-beetle, the Brother in question was the elephant, and I was the tree-sprite who saw it all from that clump of trees."

Footnotes

^147:1 Gavutaddhayojanamatte. It may possibly mean 'an eighth.'

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