Like a great part of the Buddhist stories of which the Lion and the Vulture is one, we owe its preservation to the industrious Chinese translator. In the same work that contains it, the _Tatchi-lou-lun_, we are told how, when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move till the eggs were hatched and the young birds had flown. The Buddha’s humanity is yet again shown by the story of how he saved the forest animals that were fleeing from a conflagration. The jungle caught fire and the flames spread to the forest, which burnt fiercely on three sides; one side was safe, but it was bounded by a great river. The Buddha saw the animals huddling in terror by the water’s edge. Full of pity, he took the form of a gigantic stag and placing his fore-feet on the further bank and his hind-feet on the other, he made a bridge over which the creatures could pass. His skin and flesh were cruelly wounded by their feet, but love helped him to bear the pain. When all the other animals had passed over, and when the stag’s powers were all but gone, up came a panting hare. The stag made one more supreme effort; the hare was saved, but hardly had it crossed, when the stag’s backbone broke and it fell into the water and died. The author of the fable may not have known that hares swim very well, so that the sacrifice was not necessary, unless, indeed, this hare was too exhausted to take to the water. We can picture the first Buddhist missionaries telling such stories over the vast Chinese empire to a race which had not instinctively that tender feeling for animals which existed from the most remote times in the Indian peninsula. A good authority attributes the present Chinese sensitiveness about animals wholly to those early teachers. A Sanscrit story akin to the preceding ones tells how a saint in the first stage of Buddhahood was walking in the mountains with his disciple when he saw in a cavern in the rock a tigress and her newly-born little ones. She was thin and starving and exhausted by suffering, and she cast unnatural glances on her children as they pressed close to her, confident in her love and heedless of her cruel growls. Notwithstanding his usual self-control, the saint trembled with emotion at the sight. Turning to his disciple, he cried, “My son, my son, here is a tigress, which, in spite of maternal instinct, is being driven by hunger to devour her little ones. Oh! dreadful cruelty of self-love, which makes a mother feed upon her children!”