No. 484.

SALIKEDARA-JATAKA.

[276] "The crop of rice," etc.--This was a story the Master told while dwelling at Jetavana, about a Brother who supported his mother. The occasion will be explained in the Sama Birth . Then the Master sent for this Brother, and asked him, "Is what I hear true, Brother, that you support lay folks?" "It is true, Sir." "Who are they?" "My mother and father, Sir." Said the Master, "Well done, Brother! Wise men of old, even when embodied as the lower animals, having been born as parrots even, when their parents grew old laid them in a nest and fed them with food which they brought in their own beaks." So saying, he told a story of the past.

Once upon a time, a king named King Magadha reigned in Rajagaha. At that time there stood a brahmin village, named Salindiya, towards the north-east as you go out of the city. In this north-eastern district was property belonging to Magadha. There was a brahmin who lived in Salindiya, whose name was Kosiyagotta , and he held an estate of one thousand acres , where he grew rice. When the crop was standing, he made a stout fence, and gave the land in charge to his own men, to one fifty acres, to another sixty, and so he distributed among them some five hundred acres of his estate. [277] The other five hundred he delivered to a hired man for a wage, and the man made a hut there and dwelt there day and night. Now to the north-east of this estate was a certain great wood of silk-cotton trees , growing upon the flat top of a hill, and in this wood lived a great number of parrots.

At that time the Bodhisatta was born among this flock of parrots, as the son of the king of the parrots. He grew up handsome and strong, big his body was as the nave of a cart-wheel. His father now grown old said to him, "I am able no longer to go far afield; do you take care of this flock," and committed the lordship of it to his son. From the next day onwards he refused to permit his parents to go foraging; but with the whole flock away he flew to the Himalaya hills, and after eating his fill of the clumps of rice that grew wild there, on his return brought food sufficient for his mother and father, and fed them with it.