Elephant stories and elephant festivals abound in our ancient religious texts. Since we seem to have lost our sense of the elephant as divine and reduced him to a joker whose job is to entertain us, let me tell you some of these stories. I have got them from a book called Indian Art and Mythology by SK Gupta.

The word Diggaja is used by politicians a lot to describe powerful political satraps. It comes from here:

Airavata was born from the Cosmic Golden Egg (Hiranyagarbha) from which the sun emerged. Brahma took the two halves of the shell and breathed life into them. From one, came Airavata and seven other male elephants: Pundarika, Kumda, Vmana, Anjana, Pushpadanta, Sarvabhauma and Supratika. From the second sprang 8 female elephants as their consorts: Abhramu, Kapila, Pingala, Anupama, Anjanaa, Subhadanti, Tamrakarna, Anjanavati. These eight pairs known as Diggajas stand and guard the eight quarters of the sky and Earth, becoming the symbols of strength, stability and protection. 

According to a legend, all the elephants were winged and white and able to change their shape like clouds. One day the elephants came to listen to a discourse by the sage Dirghatamas. The branch of the tree on which they sat broke and some listeners were killed and the sage disturbed. The sage cursed the elephants to lose their wings and their shape changing ability.

The birth of Gautama Buddha gives a prominent place to the elephant. Suddhodana, the King of the Sakyas, and his wife Maya were to celebrate the summer moon festival. Maya bathed in scented water and gave alms to the poor. Fully adorned, she ate the festival food and then fell asleep in her chamber. She dreamt she was taken to the Himalayas and set under an enormous Sal tree. Four great kings stood while their wives bathed her, and anointed with perfumes and flowers. On a silver mountain was a golden mansion. The queens prepared a divine bed and laid her on it. The Bodhisattva in the form of a white elephant with a white lotus and a silver rope in his trunk alighted on the mountain, circled round Maya’s bed and, smiting her right side, appeared to enter her womb. The queen repeated her dream to eminent Brahmins who interpreted it as such: the queen would have a son. He would either become a universal emperor or if he went forth into the world he would become a Buddha, a remover of the veil of ignorance.

In every story and representation of the birth of Buddha the elephant has a prominent place. In Nagarjunikonda, the elephant himself is shown as being carried down by the gods themselves.

The Buddhist scriptures have beautiful stories about the elephant. Here is the short form of one: The Boddhisattva as Saddanta was the chief of a herd of 8000 elephants. He lived in a great golden cave in the monsoons and under the banyan tree in summer. His two consorts were Chullabhadra and Mahasubhadra. Chullabhadra became jealous and presumed that Saddanta loved Mahasubhadra more. So she stopped eating and prayed to be reborn as the queen of Benaras so that she could have Saddanta killed.

She was reborn as Subhadra, the princess of Madda and married the king of Benaras. Pretending to be sick, she said she could only get well if a six tusked white elephant were to be killed and his tusks brought to her. In the gathering of hunters she nominated an ugly hunter named Sonuttara and told him where to find Saddanta. She spent a large sum of money and made all the tools for Saddanta to be killed.

Sonuttara arrived at the place of the elephants, dug a huge pit, and covered it with grass. As the elephant passed he wounded him with a poisoned weapon. The elephant, mad with pain, got ready to kill the hunter, but he stopped when he saw the yellow robes of sainthood that he was disguised in. Calmly he asked why the hunter had come, and when Sonuttara replied that he had been sent to kill him by the queen of Benaras, Saddanta realized that this was his queen Subhadra reborn.

He offered himself to be killed. Since he was so tall, he offered his trunk. The hunter climbed on it and started cutting off his tusks. The elephants mouth filled with blood and he was in excruciating pain. But when the hunter could not saw through the mighty blades, the elephant sawed them off himself and told the hunter to give them to the queen. The hunter left and Saddanta died.

The hunter placed the tusks before the queen and, as she took them on her lap, her heart filled with terrible sorrow and, remembering his love and asking his forgiveness, she died. The story is depicted in the Sanchi stupa and at Ajanta.

Another story goes like this: The Bodhisattva was born as the head of eighty thousand elephants. He adored his blind mother. Every day he collected wild fruit for her and gave it to other elephants to take them back to her. One day he found that the elephants were eating the fruit themselves and not feeding her. At night he left the herd along with his mother and went to a cave near a lake where he and his mother lived happily.

A forester lost his way and began lamenting. The Bodhisattva calmed him, fed him, and carried him out of the jungle on his back. The ungrateful forester went to the king and took money to tell them the whereabouts of the elephant. When the army arrived, the Bodhisattva thought “I am large enough to scatter a thousand elephants. But if I give way to anger I shall destroy them and the rest will hunt down my herd and I will lose my virtue. So I shall be still.” He was captured and taken to Benaras where he was festooned and taken to the king. He refused to eat for two weeks and finally told the king he could not eat if his blind mother did not.

Seeing his love for his mother, the king realized this was a Great Being and freed him. He returned to his mother and looked after her. The King of Benaras served them both and had an image of the Bodhisattva made which became the centre of the elephant festival. The elephant in the rock at Dhauli represents the Bodhisattva of the story.

The elephant has every sense that the human has, and many more. There must be a reason why the elephant represents prosperity, dignity and valour, and why so many Bodhisattvas were born as elephants. How sad that we should forget these messages and treat the elephants in our country as animals to be misused, abused and killed.

Maneka Gandhi

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