Читать книгу Garland of the Buddha's Past Lives (Volume 2) - Aryashura - Страница 12

by whom one has been wronged. In ‘The Birth-Story of the Sharabha Deer’ (25), the Bodhi·sattva thus rescues a king from a pit, even though the king had earlier tried to harm him:

Compassion meant he forgot of him as a foe

and he shared in the king’s pain instead. (25.20 [8])

This compassionate type of forbearance can take various forms. In ‘The Birth-Story of Kshanti·vadin,’ it involves pitying an aggressor for their violation of morality and for the bad karmic effects they are bound to suffer (see 28.94 [56] above).2 By contrast, in “The Birth-Story of the Elephant’ (30), the Bodhi·sattva’s forbearance involves no aggressor at all. Instead, it rests on his compassionate willingness to sacrifice his body for others in distress.3 The story’s maxim thus states: “If it results in the welfare of others, even pain is esteemed by the virtuous as a gain” (30.1).

However, while some stories define forbearance in this extended sense of compassion toward an aggressor or self-sacrifice for others, it would be difficult to argue that for-bearance, even under such extended definitions, represents a major theme in every one of the ten stories (21–30) considered to portray the third perfection. The ‘Larger Birth-Story of Bodhi’ (23) and “The Birth-Story of Brahma’ (29) are, for example, far more concerned with the issue of defeating false doctrines than they are with forbearance, although a minor theme of the former story is that the Bodhi·sattva shows compassion toward a king despite his betrayal of their friendship. Similarly, in ‘The Birth-Story of the Goose’ (22), although the protagonists do act compassion- ________