Once on a time when Brahmadatta was reigning in Benares he had a gardener named Sanjaya. Now there came into the king’s pleasaunce a Wind-antelope, which fled away at the sight of Sanjaya, but the latter let it go without terrifying the timid creature. After several visits the antelope used to roam about in the pleasaunce. Now the gardener was in the habit of gathering flowers and fruits and taking them day by day to the king. Said the king to him one day, “Have you noticed anything strange, friend gardener, in the pleasaunce?” “Only, sir, that a wind-antelope has come about the grounds.” “Could you catch it, do you think?” “Oh, yes; if I had a little honey, I’d bring it right into your majesty’s palace.”
The king ordered the honey to be given to the man and he went off with it to the pleasaunce, where he first anointed with the honey the grass at the spots frequented by the antelope, and then hid himself. When the antelope came and tasted the honied grass it was so snared by the lust of taste that it would go nowhere else but only to the pleasance. Marking the success of his snare, the gardener began gradually to show himself. The appearance of the man made the antelope take to flight for the first day or two, but growing familiar with the sight of him, it gathered confidence and gradually came to eat grass from the man’s hand. He, nothing that the creature’s confidence had been won, first strewed the path as thick as a carpet with broken boughs; then tying a gourd full of honey on his shoulder and sticking a bunch grass in his waist-cloth, he kept dropping wisps of the honied grass in front of the antelope till at last he got it right inside the palace. No sooner was the antelope, in fear and trembling for its life, dashed to and fro about the hall; and the king coming down from his chamber above, and seeing the trembling creature, said, “So timid is the Wind-antelope that for a whole week it will not revisit a spot where it has so much as seen a man; and if it has once been frightened anywhere, it never goes back there again all its life long. Yet, ensnared by the lust of taste, this wild thing from the jungle has actually come to a place like this. Truly, my friends, there is nothing viler in the world than this lust of taste.”
And with these words he let the antelope go bank to its forest again.
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