The Bodhisattva and the Starving Tigress

The Jataka tales are the birth stories of the Buddha — narratives of the many previous lives in which Siddhartha Gautama, before his final enlightenment, practiced the paramitas (perfections) that would eventually make Buddhahood possible. Each story demonstrates a virtue driven to its absolute limit, and none more so than the story of the starving tigress.

In one of his previous lives, the being-who-would-become-Buddha was a prince walking in the mountains with his companions. They came across a tigress lying in a ravine, so weak from hunger that she could barely lift her head. Beside her, her newborn cubs pressed against her. She had not been able to hunt. She was starving.

The prince's reasoning, as the text records it, is careful and explicit. He does not act from impulse. He thinks it through. His body — what is it, ultimately? He had possessed bodies in countless lives before this one, and had wasted them in trivial ways, in the service of pleasure or ambition. Here was a body that could do something specific and irreplaceable. The tigress would die. Then she would eat her own cubs. They would all die. He could stop it.

He sent his companions ahead, telling them he would follow. He went back to the ravine. He threw himself down from the cliff. The impact broke him. The tigress, roused by the smell of blood, fed. The cubs fed. They lived.

The Jatakamala — the Garland of Birth-Stories — was compiled in Sanskrit, most likely by the poet Arya Sura, around the 3rd or 4th century CE. The tigress story is its first. The author knew what he was doing by placing it first: this is the foundational act of Mahayana Buddhism. The Bodhisattva ideal — the being who delays their own final liberation in order to help all sentient beings reach enlightenment — is exactly what the prince enacts. He does not help because he is required to. He does not help because of what it will earn him. He helps because the suffering of the tigress and her cubs is real, immediate, and within his power to address.

The story has been painted on the walls of cave temples at Dunhuang and Ajanta, carved into stone across Central Asia, and told in every country where Mahayana Buddhism traveled. It is the most concentrated expression of what the Mahayana tradition values: not the personal extinction of the early Buddhist ideal, but a compassion so large it includes your own body among the things you are willing to spend.