Once upon a time when Brahmadatta was reigning in Benares, the Bodhisatta was reborn into life as a jackal and lived in the forest by the river side. Now an old elephant died by the banks of the Ganges, and the jackal, finding the carcass, happy of getting such a stock of meat.

First he bit the trunk, but that was like biting a plough handle. Then took a bite at the tusk. But that was like biting bones. Then he tried an ear but that was, like chewing the rim of a winnowing basket. So he fell to on the stomach, but found it as tough as a grain basket. The feet were no better, for they were like a mortar. Next he tried the tail, but that was like the pestle. Finally he tried the rear and found that like eating a soft cake. “At last,” said he, “I’ve found the right place,” and ate his way right into the belly, where he ate the kidneys, heart and the rest, quenching his thirst with the blood. And when night came on, he lay down inside. As he lay there the thought came into the jackal’s mind, “This carcass is both meat and house to me and why should I leave it?” So there he stopped, and lived inside the elephant. The summer sun’s heat caused shrinking of the elephant’s hide, until the entrance by which the jackal had got in was closed and the interior was in utter darkness. Thus the jackal was, as it were, cut off from the world and confined inside the elephant. After the hide, the flesh dried up and the blood was exhausted. In a frenzy of despair, he rushed to and fro beating against his prison walls in the fruitless endeavour to escape. But as he bobbed up and down inside like a ball of rice in a boiling saucepan, the sun set and dew came. It moistened the skin of the carcass and restored it to its former state, till light shone like a star through the way by which the jackal had got in. “Saved! Saved!” cried the jackal, ran out. He managed to get through, but only by leaving all his hair on the way. And first he ran, then he halted, and then sat down and surveyed his hairless body, now smooth as a palm stem. He exclaimed, “this misfortune has come to me because of my greed and my greed alone. Hence I will not be greedy nor every again into the carcass of an elephant.”

And with these words the jackal ran away, nor did he ever again had look of any other elephant’s carcass. And then he was never greedy again.