[51] So saying, the Great Being, extinguishing all feeling of anger towards him, asked him, saying, "Why did you wound me? Was it for your own advantage or were you suborned by some one else?"

The Master explaining the matter then said:

The beast with mighty shaft laid low,
Unruffled still, addressed his foe:
"What object, friend, in slaying me,
And, pray, who instigated thee?"

Then the hunter told him and uttered this stanza:

The king of Kasi's favoured queen
Subhadda told me she had seen
Thy form in dreams, "and so," said she,
"I'll have his tusks; go, bring them me."

Hearing this, and recognizing that this was the work of Cullasubhadda, he bore his sufferings patiently and thought, "She does not want my tusks; she sent him because she wished to kill me," and, to illustrate the matter, he uttered a couple of stanzas:

Rich store of goodly tusks have I,
Relics of my dead ancestry,
And this well knows that cursed dame,
'Tis at my life the wretch doth aim.

[52] Rise, hunter, and or ere I die.
Saw off these tusks of ivory:
Go bid the shrew be of good cheer,
"The beast is slain; his tusks are here."

Hearing his words the hunter rose up from the place where he was sitting and, saw in hand, came close to him to cut off his tusks. Now the elephant, being like a mountain eighty cubits high, was but ineffectually cut. For the man could not reach to his tusks. So the Great Being, bending his body towards him, lay with his head down. Then the hunter climbed up the trunk of the Great Being, pressing it with his feet as though it were a silver rope, and stood on his forehead as if it had been