{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Buddhism","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_bud_j2_j2012_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_bud_j2_j2012_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_bud_j2_j2012_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/bud/j2/j2012.htm","summary":"This is a Jataka tale \u2014 a Buddhist birth story from the Pali canon \u2014 here presented in W.H.D. Rouse's 1895 English translation. The framing narrative has the Buddha telling the story to a monk who has backslid after being tempted by a woman in fine dress; the tale is meant to show that even the wise can fall when desire catches them unguarded. In the story itself, the Bodhisatta (the Buddha in a former life) is born as a golden peacock who protects himself each day with recited charms, but is ultimately captured when a hunter uses a peahen's cry to distract him before he can complete his morning spell \u2014 the direct parallel to the monk undone by a woman's appearance. Brought before a king who wants to eat him for eternal youth, the peacock dismantles the folk belief: his golden color comes from past virtue (keeping the Five Commandments), not from any magical property his flesh could transfer. He then delivers the story's core Buddhist teaching \u2014 that all composite things are impermanent and insubstantial, with only Nirvana being everlasting \u2014 and converts the king to the precepts. The tale is distinctive in how tightly it integrates its doctrinal argument (impermanence, the causality of karma) with its narrative logic: the peacock's capture and his rebuttal of immortality claims both turn on the same point about the limits of the material world.","tags":["Buddha's Previous Lives","Jataka Tales","Pali Text Society"],"text":null,"title":"The Jataka, Vol. II: Book II. Dukanip\u0101ta: No. 159. Mora-J\u0101taka","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Buddhism","translated_text":null,"word_count":1433}