When traveling together,
mixed together
with a person who doesn’t know,
an attainer-of-wisdom,
on realizing that the person is evil,
abandons him
as a milk-feeding2 heron,
a bog.
Notes
1. Throughout the first part of this story, Ven. Nāgasamāla refers to the Buddha with this exaggerated form of address. Perhaps the compilers meant this as a linguistic hint of how inappropriate an attendant he was for the Buddha. (Suppavāsā uses it in Ud 2:8, but there it is appropriate as she is overcome with joy.) At the point in the present narrative where Ven. Nāgasamāla puts the Buddha’s bowl and robes on the ground, the Sri Lankan and Burmese editions correct his statement to the more appropriate: “This, lord, is the Blessed One’s bowl & robes.” However, to be in keeping with his normal way of addressing the Buddha, and to stress the rudeness of the gesture, I felt it better to keep the sentence as it is in the Thai edition. Only after Ven. Nāgasamāla is chastened by his experience with the thieves does he revert to the using the simpler and more standard address: “lord.”
2. Milk-feeding = khīrapaka. This is a poetic way of saying “young and unweaned”–the “milk” here being the regurgitated food with which the mother heron feeds her young. Also–in the conventions of Indian literature–the reference to milk suggests that the heron is white. The Commentary has a fanciful way of explaining this term, saying that it refers to a special type of heron so sensitive that, when fed milk mixed with water, it drinks just the milk.
Origin URL: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/Ud/ud8_7.html