(I copied this parable from Kim by Rudyard Kipling, with a few minor changes for the sake of clarity. Kipling got the story from the Jataka, a vast collection of stories detailing some of the myriad incarnations of Buddha.)
Long and long ago, an elephant was captured for a time by the king’s hunters and, ere he broke free, beringed with a grievous leg-iron. This he strove to remove with hate and frenzy in his heart, and hurrying up and down the forests, besought his brother-elephants to wrench it asunder. One by one, with their strong trunks, they tried and failed. At last they gave it as their opinion that the ring was not to be broken by any bestial power.
And in a thicket, newborn, wet with the moisture of birth, lay a day-old calf of the herd whose mother had died. The fettered elephant, forgetting his own agony, said: “If I do not help this suckling it will perish under our feet.” So he stood above the young thing, making his legs buttresses against the uneasy moving herd; and he begged milk of a virtuous cow, and the calf throve, and the ringed elephant was the calf’s guide and defense.
Now the days of an elephant are thirty-five years to his full strength, and through thirty-five Rains the ringed elephant befriended the younger, and all the while the fetter ate into the flesh.
Then one day the young elephant saw the half-buried iron, and turning to the elder said: “What is this?”
“It is even my sorrow,” said he who had befriended him.
Then that other put out his trunk and in the twinkling of an eyelash abolished the ring, saying, “The appointed time has come.”
So the virtuous elephant who had waited temperately and done kind acts was relieved, at the appointed time, by the very calf who he had turned aside to cherish, for the elephant was Ananda, and the Calf that broke the ring was none other than Buddha himself.”
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