Buddhist Stories: “The Starving Tigress” (Part 2 of 3) Aug. 23, 2015

After the Buddha preached to them, all of their vexation, anger, frustration, greed, jealousy, all that were all gone, cleaned off, cleaned off, meaning all the past karma was cleansed. And then the two sons immediately attained Arhat. And the mother is a little less, Anagamin (non-returner). Ananda knelt down in front of the Buddha and said, “Obeisance to the World Honored One, could you please tell us why these three, mother and sons, suddenly have such a blessing that they even attained a very high level of spiritual consciousness, and have such a luck to have met the Buddha, and then become the disciples and monks even.” So the Buddha said, “You should know, long, long, long time, long, long, many eons, many eons ago, also on this planet.” “One time, the king and his main wife, and his concubines, and the three sons, went together into a forest, just for fun. When the king was resting under the shade of a tree, the three princes just went around to look in the forest. When they went to one side of the forest, they all saw one mother tiger, a tigress, and two small tigers, baby tigers. The mother was very skinny, only skin covered her bones. She was dying. She was dying of hunger. But the mother tiger seemed somehow to want to eat the two little babies. So at that time, Mahasattva, the third prince, felt very, very sorry. He was thinking to himself, ‘Life after life, I live and die, live and die, so many times. But those bodies have only brought trouble, made more karma, nothing helpful to anybody. And then I give it to the tiger, my body. And then in exchange I might have, and I pray for, the merciful wisdom, the long-lasting forever merciful wisdom.’ So the prince used a pointed wood branch and punched himself. Punched himself here and there, everywhere, so that the blood came out into her mouth. After eating, all of them were very strong. And only the bones were left.” “Ananda, at that time, the king is now my father. And the prince Mahasattva was me. It was one of my incarnations. The mother tigress at that time is this old woman now. Now is this old woman. And the two sons, her two sons, were the two little tigers before, long, long, long time ago. At that time, I saved their lives. And now I became a Buddha, I also saved their lives again, and even saved their souls.”