The Six-Tusked Elephant

Also known as Chaddanta Jataka

• 3 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Jataka Tales

In a lake in the far north lived a white elephant with six tusks who was the leader of a great herd.

He had two wives. One day, walking beneath a sal tree, he shook it, and the flowers came down on one of them and the dry twigs and ants came down on the other, and she believed he had done it on purpose.

He had not. But she carried it for the rest of her life, and when she died she was reborn as a queen, and she remembered.

The hunter

As queen she pretended to be ill and told the king that only one thing would cure her: she had dreamt of an elephant with six tusks, and she must have those tusks.

The king sent for hunters, and one named Sonuttara said he could find it.

He walked north for seven years, seven months and seven days, which is how the story measures it, and at the end of that he came to the lake.

He dug a pit on the path the elephant used and covered it, and he put on the yellow robe of a monk, because he knew the elephant would not harm anyone wearing it.

The pit

The elephant walked into the pit and Sonuttara struck him from below with a poisoned arrow.

The herd came, hearing him, and the elephant did what he did next entirely deliberately: he stood over the hunter and hid him with his own body so the herd would not find him, and sent them away.

Then he asked the man to come out.

"Why have you done this?"

"The queen sent me. She wants your tusks."

The elephant lay there for a while.

"Then take them," he said. "Not because you have earned them. Because if you go back without them she will find another hunter and he will find another elephant, and I would rather it ended here."

The tusks

Sonuttara could not do it. He could not reach and could not cut, and after a long time of trying he sat down and said so.

So the elephant took the saw from him with his own trunk and cut them off himself, and gave them to him, and told him the road south.

Then he died.

The queen

Sonuttara walked back and laid the tusks in front of the queen in her own hall, and told her the whole of it, including the sal tree, because the elephant had told him to.

She sat looking at them.

And she remembered everything: the flowers, the twigs, the ants, the thing that had not been done on purpose, and the seven years she had spent making this happen.

She did not survive the day.