Before We Begin
The results are in! A majority of you listeners have voted for a single longer episode every week with occasional bonuses rather than two shorter ones. We’ll be switching to this model in the New Year.
In this episode, we’re doing a Jataka tale. The Jataka tales as you may have heard are stories told by the Buddha. In a time, when most knowledge was presented far too academically and was basically inaccessible to the common person, these stories served to spread the Buddha’s teachings. We’ve covered some before. Check out the links in the show notes if you’d like to listen or read those. But there are hundreds more. And they usually have a moral at the end.
Today’s story has a moral too. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Today’s story
Special agent Ishaan Hawk urgently looked around. His leg was trapped and he had still not acquired the target. A drop of sweat trickled slowly down his face. The floor around him was rigged with temperature and pressure sensors. He had exactly 30 seconds remaining to acquire his target. How was he going to get out of this one?
We’ll soon see how he landed in that situation. But first, let’s flashback to the beginning of the story. Special Agent Ishaan Hawk was on a holiday! His last mission was an Inception-style multi-layered heist, which involved stealing the crown from some people who were themselves stealing it from people who had robbed it in the first place. He deserved this holiday.
He was holidaying in the Kingdom of Magadha. A Kingdom that was well known for its local food and flavors. And that’s what Special Agent Hawk was after. So he’d flown down here to this Kingdom to do just that and to take in the local sights and sounds besides. And when I say he flew down there, I don’t mean he took an airplane the way normal tourists do. Because he wasn’t a normal tourist. Special Agent Ishaan Hawk was a bird.
After a particularly excellent lunch, Ishaan Hawk laid back on his branch looking at the passing sights, he saw something that made him sit up and take notice. It was a pigeon. But not an ordinary pigeon. This one was richly dressed. She was wearing a monocle! Obviously from a well-to-do house. Hawk decided to find out more. He hopped onto the branch the pigeon was on and introduced himself.
“Hawk. Ishaan Hawk” he said
“But you’re a crow” the pigeon replied.
“I know, I get that all the time. I’m in the Import-Export business, but I’m here on vacation. Tell me more about you. What’s a fine pigeon like you doing on a branch like this” he asked her.
“This is just my exercise. I like to get out of the palace sometimes!”
It turns out that the pigeon was not royalty. But she came close to it. She was the pet of the Royal Cook. That explained the rich clothes. Sensing an opportunity here, despite his vacation, Hawk had an idea. To the Pigeon, whose name was Kabootar, he said: “I don’t want to seem forward ma’am. But if it’s alright with you, can I accompany you back home? A short while ago, I saw a hawk circling overhead. A real hawk. And if there are two of us, maybe he won’t attack.”
“Oh my! Goodness me. Certainly, I’ll be grateful for your company” she replied.
The two made it back. They obviously did not see a real hawk – that had just been a ruse.
Kabootar was gushing with gratitude. She offered for him to come in and grab a sip of water from the watering cup in her home – a basket that hung from the ceiling in one corner. Hawk immediately accepted and made pleasant conversation at least until the Cook entered the room and noticed him. He said his goodbyes and offered to escort her the next day on her run. Kabootar loved his company and not suspecting anything sinister, she gladly accepted.
This went on for a few days. Until the Cook, now acclimatized to the Crow’s presence, hung up a second basket next to the first. All had gone according to Hawk’s grand plan.
You see, Hawk had heard that the best food in Magadha was prepared in the palace. He was not content with feeding off of the scraps of food outside restaurants and near picnic tables. He was special agent Hawk. A real connoisseur of food. He preferred his kheer shaken, not stirred, and he could tell the difference between the two. Nothing but the best would do for him.
He gladly moved in into the basket. It was a nice cozy place, and Kabootar was especially friendly towards him. He was friendly back. Not because she was a nice bird, but because she was a means to his end goal. He wanted to eat off of the royal menu! In particular, he had heard of Gulab Jamuns. Unfortunately for him, nobody ever accidentally dropped a Gulab Jamun in any outdoor dining areas or picnic benches. But now, he was closer to his goal than ever.
The problem was, his very first attempt would have to succeed and he would have to do it when Kabootar was not around. Or she might raise the alarm.
He would have to sneak into the kitchen, which thankfully was right next door. But he would need a diversion to get watchful eyes out of the way
Years of espionage training and practice kicked into high gear in his mind. He did a perimeter scan with some fancy gadgetry and secretly worked on blueprints when Kabootar was sleeping.
Both the cook’s room where the baskets were hung, as well as the kitchen, seemed full of pots and pans and sensitive to any weight that might drop on them, even something as light as a single drop of water. It’s likely the noise of the falling weight would be amplified by the shape of the vessel. It was also possible that the pans would clatter and make loud noises if slightly displaced. What’s more, there were several pots and pans hanging and if flapped his wings, it’s likely they would sway and clang against each other. There were hundreds of ways this could go wrong, he thought. This is a well-planned security system.
He decided the only way to go about grabbing a Gulab Jamun from the kitchen was to do it with flying. He would have to be suspended from the ceiling.
Though he had been accompanying Kabootar every day on her run, he would have to find an excuse to sit it out once, the next time Gulab Jamoons got made.
He waited for just such a day, and when he spied that delectable dessert on the menu for the next day, he set his plan in motion. Hawk worked all night to get prepared, and the next morning, he did not even have to act tired. He was exhausted.
Kabootar was visibly worried. “Oh poor you. You look terribly exhausted” she said. “I should probably stay back to take care of you”.
But Hawk had planned for that possibility.
“You must go sister,” he said. “Please get me some medicine on your way back. And don’t cut short your exercise – if I had simply done that before coming here, I would not be sick today”.
That convinced her. The moment she flew out of the window, Hawk began to get out a long piece of string that he had hidden in his basket. He dropped softly to the ground. Careful not to flap his wings, and got to the vent quickly. He found a place to secure one end of the string, tied the other to his leg, and began lowering himself gently into the Kitchen. Hawk had carefully built timetables of all the comings and goings. He knew he would have exactly 5 minutes before the Cook was scheduled to return from his bath.
The Gulab Jamoon smell was tantalizingly close now. He saw a big pot in which they were slowly cooking, kept warm in their sweet syrup by a smoldering fire. As he lowered himself, the string suddenly caught on something. The other end of the string tightened around his ankle, and cut deep. He stifled a cry. He could not be discovered now. A bead of perspiration trickled down his face and almost to the end of his beak. Underneath him was a pot of water, with enough water to cause the loudest noise if the drop of sweat were to fall in. He was running out of time!
Hawk could not flap his wings, he could not drop to the ground, he could not cut the rope. But what could he do now? This was enough to drive him cuckoo. Cuckoo. Wait a minute the Cuckoo clock. If he could just adjust his position, the cuckoo from the clock would pop out and give him just the tiny bit of momentum he needed to swing in the right direction away from. Quickly, he pulled out his swiss army knife and started cutting at the string. He had timed it perfectly!
Just as he cut away the last strand of the rope, the cuckoo clock popped out and changed his trajectory just a little, so that instead of fulling into the pot of water and making a loud noise, he landed perfectly on the rim of the Gulab Jamoon Cauldron.
“And he sticks the landing! That’s a 10 out of 10! Maybe I ought to go in for gymnastics after this” he thought.
He looked down at the beautiful dessert, that seemed to be lightly browned to perfection. His mouth-watering, he leaned forward to grab the best of the lot. And that’s when everything began going against him. He slipped and fell right into the cauldron. Panicking, he tried to fly out, alarm, or no alarm. But his wings were too heavily weighed down by the thick and sticky sugar syrup. It was hot besides, which made it harder for Hawk. Finally, his loud attempts brought the cook to the kitchen.
The King was very very cross because he could not have those Gulab Jamoons now. He punished the cook, who in turn took it out on the Crow. He clipped the bird’s wings, still heavily soaked with sugar syrup, and tossed him out of the window. Well, in that shape – unable to fly and smelling so sweet thanks to the syrup, Hawk didn’t stand a chance. None of his gadgets could save him from the predators that quickly descended on the scene. Ironically, it included a real hawk!
His last thought was that he still didn’t get a chance to try a Gulab Jamoon. The syrup, sure. He didn’t have a choice except to drink some as he was trying to fight for his life in the cauldron. But an actual Gulab Jamoon? He still had not tried that.
That’s all for now
Some notes on the show
As I’ve mentioned before, the Buddha used tales like these to spread his teachings. This one clearly focuses on greed. The crow had a comfortable existence with good bird food at the palace. Something that is not available to the ordinary crow. Pigeons were kept as pets often, but crows – almost never.
This lesson should not be mistaken as discouraging ambition or out of the box thinking, however. Morally, what the crow did, was equivalent to stealing from the hand that fed him. And that’s just plain inexcusable.
Other Jataka tales we have previously covered are here
That’s all for now.
Next Episode
In the next episode, we’re actually going to cover Shoorpanakha’s back story. After the last episode, some of you expressed an interest in learning more, and I’m glad to cover some stories from her life.