Manuscript Illustrations Of Uttaradhyayana Sutra

Author(s): W Norman Brown
Publisher: American Oriental Society

Page 87

27. THE BALKY BULLOCKS The learned monk Garga, leader of a school (ganadhara), once reflected: “He who is drawn in a cart crosses a jungle; he who is drawn in the cart of] spiritual discipline crosses the Samsāra. But he who yokes balky bullocks to his cart is worn out with beating them. He gets no peace of mind; his goad" is broken. He bites one in the tail, and strikes the other time after time. One smashes the yoke pin; the other dashes off the road. One falls on its side, sits down, lies down; [the other) leaps up, bucks, guilefully makes for a heifer. (One) trickily charges head down in anger, then retreats; (the other] full of wile stands still, then runs at full speed. [One,] after a female, snaps the driving rope and, unmanageable, smashes the yoke; (the other,] snorting and jerking, dashes away. Just as balky bullocks are when yoked, so bad disciples are when yoked to the cart of the Law: they break it through their lack of mental discipline." He then remarks that some are vainglorious, sybaritic, sulky, lazy, sensitive, argumentative, disobedient, overbearing, unreliable. Finally, since he himself had balky disciples, he left them and went his own way to practise austerities.
The artists of the manuscripts obviously indulged their sense of the amusing in illustrating this chapter. JM (fig. 110; misplaced in the manuscript at Chapter 29) shows in the upper register a monk preaching and another listening. In the lower register is a two-wheeled cart with a pair of bullocks. A well-dressed layman is riding in the body of the cart, and the driver sits at the near end of the shaft, flourishing a long double whip in his left hand and prodding with his goad in his right hand, while the bullocks toss their heads back snorting. The left-hand bullock is bending its legs to sit down, while the other is just ready to make a breakaway. HV (fig. 107) has an almost identical scene, although the subjects of the two registers are reversed. The cart is much more elaborate than in JM, and behind it stands a layman with one hand held up as though deploring the bullock's balkiness. Over the passenger's head is a parasol, as though he were a king. DV (fig. 109) shows approximately the same scene as HV, but without the third man and the parasol.
JP (fig. 108) shows, in its lower register, two men trying to control an unmanageable bullock; there is no cart. One man is in front of the animal, holding one end of the driving rope, which, as is usual, passes through the bullock's nose, and he is trying to cajole it. The other man, who is behind the bullock, holds the other end of the driving rope, and is prodding the animal just behind the head. The bullock is leaping with all four feet clear of the ground, which we can see is rough and hilly. Overhead is a cloud. In the upper register a monk is trying to persuade two disciples, but they have rudely turned their backs on him and are walking away without listening.
4S01.
1 A bullock driver's goad has a whip attached to it. When the whip is worn away or broken off, the driver has only the goad left. When all other forms of encouragement fail, it is no uncommon resource of a desperate driver to grasp a bullock's tail and bite it. The result is generally sudden, and sometimes alarming.
Cf. the conduct of Kālaka with his disciples in BrKK p. 65.
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