4

The sixth weapon and the sticky ghoul

A curious little Jataka tells of the importance of mental agility or rather, self-control and focus. These sharpen the wits whereby many an opponent or obstacle can be overcome. This Jataka, with its elaborate build-up, may take its time getting to the point but those were the days of oil lamps and scary shadows, just right for a long, ghoulish yet moral tale. In this story, the Bodhisattva was born as a prince of Varanasi and 800 fortune tellers predicted over his hapless baby head that he would be a great warrior ‘with mastery over the five weapons’—which we, like those before us, do not require diagrams to decode as the good old Panchendri or the Five Senses, those built-in snares by which each one of us is led astray. So they named the prince ‘Panchaastra’, meaning ‘Five Weapons’ in Sanskrit, in affirmation that he would perfectly control these five weapons used by Nature against Spirit, and would even turn the Panchendri into weapons of his own.

In due course, the prince was sent for even higher learning than could be obtained in his already great home town to an accomplished guru of the age. The guru lived north by northwest of Varanasi at Takshashila, which was famous then for enlightened teachers. After a pleasant and useful stay at Takshashila, the prince set off homewards to Varanasi carrying five wonderful weapons gifted by his guru, becoming literally a ‘Panchaastra’ now in addition to his mastery of the Five Senses.

Entering a dark jungle, the prince, in the best classical tradition, was at once treated to a perfect concert of blood-curdling howls. When these horrific sounds that made even his princely hair stand on end died away to a moment of menacing silence, he was straightaway, and with vigour, set upon by a man-eating ghoul, whom the Jataka reliably informs us had a particularly nasty nature and also had sticky hair, staring eyes and an unpleasantly mottled belly. Perfectly cool and calm—a credit to both his horoscope and his high-level training—the prince unleashed one weapon after the other, but everything that he sent flying at his foe merely stuck to the ghoul’s hair and body. Finally, he attacked him with his fists and found that he, too, was firmly stuck. While the ghoul, though determined not to forgo lunch, privately wondered at the prince’s courage, the prince remembered the guru he had left behind and sure enough, was rewarded with a thought.

‘My greatest weapon is still unused,’ he calmly proceeded to inform the ghoul. ‘It is a diamond-edged weapon, lodged inside me by my guru’s extraordinary powers. If you eat me, it will tear your guts apart from within. So there.’

Greatly impressed, if not by fear of a fancy astra then certainly by the prince’s bravado, the ghoul freed the prince and sent him on his way with false bright promises to desist thereafter from being a threat to the populace. The prince mentally saluted his guru for teaching him how to think his way out of a fix when all else had failed—the greatest weapon of all.