The Exemplary Tale About a Sow

The Exemplary Tale About a Sow belongs to a genre of the Buddha’s teaching known as avadāna, “exemplary tale,” which consist of narratives aimed at illustrating the workings of karma and instilling the principles of generosity and virtuous conduct. In this case, the story is about a god who succeeds in averting a particularly wretched state of rebirth by taking refuge in the Three Jewels.

It is one of the few separate avadāna texts in the Kangyur. For the most part, texts of this type are found scattered throughout the vast Mūla­sarvāstivāda Vinaya or grouped together in the didactic anthologies of the Avadānaśataka and the Karmaśataka.1 This avadāna, however, occurs by itself and this is probably due to the esteem in which it was held when it was translated into Tibetan around the turn of the ninth century ᴄᴇ.

One of the likely reasons for its renown was that Śāntideva (late seventh–early eighth century ᴄᴇ), who rose to prominence in Nālandā after composing the Bodhi­caryāvatāra (Toh 3871), quotes this avadāna in his older training compendium, the Śikṣāsamuccaya (Toh 3940). In the eighth chapter of this work, where Śāntideva explains how to purify oneself from past wrongdoings (pāpaviśodhana), he explicitly mentions The Exemplary Tale About a Sow in order to affirm the potency of taking refuge in the Three Jewels, “the power of support” (āśrayabala), as it is put in the Catur­dharma­nirdeśa­sūtra.2 The verse that he cites is the first verse that is exclaimed by Indra, the lord of Trāyastriṃśa heaven, in The Exemplary Tale About a Sow:3

It is the only avadāna that Śāntideva refers to in the Śikṣāsamuccaya, which is largely comprised of textual citations of Mahāyāna sūtras, and its mention must have carried significant weight. It was not long after Śāntideva had passed away that the Tibetan translator Yeshé Dé, who was responsible for the translation of the Śikṣāsamuccaya, also undertook the translation of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow, together with the Kashmiri scholar-monk Jinamitra. This prolific lotsawa also included a short summary of the story in his mnemonic treatise on the Bhadra­carīpraṇidhāna called bzang spyod kyi ’grel pa bzhi’i don bsdus nas brjed byang,4 and the avadāna is further mentioned by Paltsek, another important Tibetan translator at the time, in his treatise called gsung rab rin po che’i gtam rgyud dang shakya’i rabs rgyud.5 It seems, in fact, that Yeshé Dé’s summary is derived from the synopsis of this avadāna in the Bhadra­carīpraṇidhāna­rāja­ṭīkā,6 a commentary by the Indian master Bhadrapaṇa that was translated into Tibetan by Jñānagarbha and Paltsek during the same period. In this commentary, Bhadrapaṇa, who also lived in the eighth century, similarly refers to The Exemplary Tale About a Sow to illustrate “the power of support,” as Śāntideva does in the Śikṣāsamuccaya.

In the centuries that followed, this avadāna continued to be well known in the Buddhist world. The Chinese translation that has come down to us was made in the Song capital Bianliang sometime between 982 and 1001 ᴄᴇ by the Indian scholar-monk Dharmadeva, who is described as having received his training in Nālandā.7 Prajñākaramati (±950–1030), one of the famous gatekeepers at the Vikramaśīla monastery, quotes the first verse in his commentary on Śāntideva’s Bodhi­caryāvatāra‍—again to point out the potency of the Three Refuges in clearing away past wrongdoings‍—with direct reference to the Śikṣāsamuccya.8 The same verse is cited by Dharmakīrti of Suvarṇadvīpa, present-day Sumatra, in his commentary on the Abhisamayālaṅkāra,9 which was translated into Tibetan by Atiśa and Rinchen Zangpo around the middle of the eleventh century. The quotation is also found at the beginning of the Ādikarmapradīpa,10 the bodhisattva manual compiled by the tantric master Anupamavajra, who was influential in the Kathmandu Valley from the twelfth century onward.

While these citations of the first verse, all with explicit reference to the title and story of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow, can be attributed to the lasting influence of Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya, the verse itself appears to derive its authority from elsewhere. In the Mahāsamāja Sūtra, one of the old Mahāsūtras of the Sarvāstivāda tradition, it is a god of the Brahmā group who exclaims this verse after congregating with deities from all ten directions at the forest in Kapilavastu when the Buddha was giving the monks a teaching on nirvāṇa there.11 In a somewhat different wording, the same verse is voiced by a god from Śuddhāvāsa heaven in the Mahāsamaya Sutta, which is the Pali counterpart to the Mahāsamāja Sūtra and likewise an important text that was recited for protective purposes over the centuries.12 These attestations of the verse are considerably older than the first citation from The Exemplary Tale About a Sow by Śāntideva in the eighth century ᴄᴇ, and it seems, therefore, that the verse had a life of its own before it was adapted to this specific avadāna.

This can also be seen in the fact that the first three verses of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow, one for each of the Three Jewels, occur independently, outside the setting of this avadāna, on a single paper leaf found among the Sanskrit manuscript remains at Turfan, in modern-day Xinjiang province, which tend to date to the fifth to sixth centuries ᴄᴇ.13 We find the same three verses on the Three Jewels in the Apaṇṇakajātaka, a Pali jātaka that probably dates to slightly before this period and that, in terms of the story, bears no connection with The Exemplary Tale About a Sow.14 It therefore appears that these verses were widely known and recited at one point in time, independently from any particular story.15

The same could be said for the other three verses in The Exemplary Tale About a Sow. Although the extant Sanskrit version in the Divyāvadāna (one of the important collections of avadānas preserved in Nepalese manuscripts) does not contain these three verses,16 they are found in both the Tibetan and the Chinese translations and therefore must have been present in other Sanskrit versions of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow that circulated at the time these translations were made. These verses again have an even earlier attestation, since they occur together in the chapter on mindfulness in the Udānavarga, the Sarvāstivāda collection of the Buddha’s sayings that forms the Sanskrit counterpart to the Pali Dhammapada.17 The first of these verses reads:

That these verses in the Udānavarga were held in high regard is clear from the fact that they are cited by none other than Vasubandhu at the beginning of his Gāthāsaṅgraha,18 the short anthology of twenty-one verses that he compiled before he turned to the Mahāyāna. Vasubandhu lived in the fourth to fifth century ᴄᴇ, showing that these three verses had already become celebrated at that time‍—well before the end of the eighth century when the Tibetan translation of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow was made on the basis of a Sanskrit version that included these verses. The Chinese translation, made by Dharmadeva about two centuries after the Tibetan translation, contains another set of three verses and a concluding verse that seem to have been added in the interval, but we have not been able to identify their source.

The English translation of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow that is offered here is based on the Tibetan translation by the Kashmiri paṇḍita Jinamitra and the Tibetan lotsawa Yeshe Dé from the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth century, at the time of the first transmission (snga dar) of the Dharma to Tibet. We have based our translation on the text found in the Degé Kangyur, for which we have used the modern Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma), in which variant readings of several other Kangyurs of the Tshalpa line are also recorded. We have also checked the Stok Palace manuscript for variant readings in the Thempangma line of textual transmission. The few such variants were found to be minor and orthographical in nature, without any implication for the meaning of the text.

In addition to the Tibetan text, we have also consulted the Sanskrit version of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow that is found in the Divyāvadāna,19 which shows a number of differences, some of which derive from it belonging to a different line of textual transmission that has continued in the Kathmandu Valley until modern times. Some differences in the Tibetan translation, however, can be ascribed to a certain translation choice by Jinamitra and Yeshé Dé or an omission in the underlying Sanskrit, especially in those cases where the renderings of the Chinese translation are in agreement with the extant Sanskrit version. In one instance, we have adopted a phrase that is present in both the Divyāvadāna Sanskrit version and the Chinese translation, because it makes the narrative more complete. All these differences, including the significant variants in the Chinese translation by Dharmadeva,20 have been noted in the endnotes.

Finally, a note about the title of The Exemplary Tale About a Sow: Usually, avadānas involve a narration of a person’s actions that took place in a distant past, to which only the Buddha, in his omniscience, has access, as is the case in the Buddha’s own past life stories known as jātakas. The title, in those cases, refers to that previous existence of the person in question. In this case, however, the narrated events occurred in a more recent past, not long before they are here recounted by the Buddha to a gathering of monks at Śrāvastī, and the title points not to the lifetime that once was, but to the future life that would have been if it had not been for the Three Jewels.