North Indian Inscriptions

PART B

with its slight hunchback, it has more the appearance of a nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) than of a black buck. But even if the animal of the inscription should not be a ṛiśya, this could hardly be used as an argument against the proposed translation of isimigo, as we may reasonably assume that in such minutiae the sculptor followed his own taste.

  The grammatically incorrect use of the nominative isimigo in title of the Jātaka has a parallel in Sujato gahuto jātaka in No. B 50.

B 49 (785); PLATES VI, XLI

ON the same pillar of the North-Western quadrant as No. A 32, now in the Indian Museum, Calcutta (M 9). The inscription is engraved over a medallion, directly below the donative inscription No. A 32, but probably in a different hand. Edited by Cunningham, PASB. 1874, p. 115; StBh. (1879), p. 61 ff.; 137, No. 74 and Pl. XXVI and LIV; Hultzsch, ɀDMG. Vol. XL (1886), p. 70, No. 85 (second part), and Pl.; IA. Vol. XXI (1892), p. 234, No. 85 (second part); Ramaprasad Chanda, MASI. No. I (1919), p. 19, No. 5, and Pl. V; Barua-Sinha, BI. (1926), p. 93, No. 217; Barua, Barh. Vol. II (1934), p. 141 f., and Vol. III (1937), Pl. LXXXVII (128); Lüders, Bhārh. (1941), p. 155 ff.

TEXT:
chhadaṁtiya jātakaṁ

TRANSLATION:
The Jataka relating to the six-tusked elephant.

  The sculpture to which the label refers was identified by Cunningham with the Chhaddantajātaka, No. 514 of the Pāli Jātaka book. The prose tale is a later and much embellished version of the Jātaka, which is sometimes even at variance with the Gāthās. The chief points of the story as warranted by the Gāthās are as follows. The Bodhisattva is born as a white elephant with six tusks, who lives as a leader of a large herd under a banyan tree near Mount Suvaṇṇapassa. He has two mates, Sabbabhaddā and another whose name was perhaps Subhaddā^[1]. The Bodhisattva pays more attention to Sabbabhaddā. In the prose story, for instance, it is told that one day he presents her a large lotus flower which another elephant had offered him. Subhaddā, out of jealousy, starves herself to death and dies with the wish to be reborn as the consort of the king of Banares in order to wreak vengeance on the Bodhisattva. When she has become queen, she pretends to have a craving for the tusks of the white elephant and dispatches a hunter to the place where he lives. Attired in the yellow robe of a monk, the hunter hides in a pit and discharges an arrow at the elephant. Although sorely wounded, the Bodhisattva, out of reverence for the hunter’s religious dress, does not harm him, and when he is informed that the hunter has come for his tusks, he summons him to saw them off himself before he dies. The queen on receiving the tusks and hearing of the death of her former mate is filled with remorse and dies of a broken heart.

   On the right side of the medallion the six-tusked elephant is seen standing under a banyan tree, accompanied by a female elephant who by a lotus flower on her front is characterized as the beloved Sabbabhaddā, while another female elephant appearing in the background is apparently the jealous Subhaddā. On the left the elephant, with an arrow stuck
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^[1]In the prose tale they are called Mahāsubhaddā and Chullasubhaddā, but in G. 17; 34 the name of the favourite she-elephant is Sabbabhaddā, while the name of the second she-elephant does not occur in the Gāthās. Subhaddā is mentioned in G. 29 only as her name in her birth as queen of Banares.