Once the Bodhisatta was a Brahmin teacher, and among his five hundred pupils was a very foolish but devoted youth, who had a knack of saying the wrong thing. Hoping to cure him, the Bodhisatta asked him to report anything that he saw.
One day the youth saw a snake, and on being asked by the Bodhisatta how it looked, he answered, “like the shaft of a plough” (naṅgalisa). The Bodhisatta thought the simile good, but when it was used again about an elephant, a sugar-