cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/53097658

About Kūṭadanta (A Bloodless Sacrifice). The Brahmin Kūṭadanta wants to hold a great sacrifice with the slaughter of many hundreds of beasts. He appeals (improbably, as Rhys Davids points out!) to the Buddha for advice on how to do this. The Buddha tells him the story of an ancient king and his Brahmin chaplain, who performed a purely symbolic, bloodless sacrifice. Kūṭadanta sits in silence at the end of this narrative, having realised that the Buddha did not say: ‘I have heard this’, and the Buddha confirms that it is a story from one of his past lives, thus technically a ‘birth-story’ (Jātaka). The Buddha then tells of ‘sacrifices more profitable’, that is, the higher benefits as in Sutta 2. Kūṭadanta liberates the hundreds of animals he had destined for slaughter, saying: ‘Let them be fed with green grass and given cool water to drink, and let cool breezes play upon them’. He becomes a lay-follower, and the ‘pure and spotless Dhamma-eye’ opens in him.

- (Summary by) Walshe, Maurice, “The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya”