88. SĀRAMBHA-JĀTAKA — From Force to Silence
The Ox That Would Not Move, the Ox of the Mirror, and the Word Before the Word
Appendix to the Second Jātaka of Level 2 — The Test of Virtue and Reciprocity
From Force to Listening
There are stories in which nothing seems to change outwardly, and yet, by the end, everything has changed.
The road is the same.
The cart is the same.
The ox is the same.
The uphill road is the same.
And yet, at a certain point, the cart begins to move.
What has changed?
In the Sāraṃbha-Jātaka, the answer appears simple: the man changes the way he addresses the animal. Force, command and anger produce no result; another kind of speech opens the possibility of reciprocity.
But within this simplicity lies a deeper question:
when something in our life refuses to move, are we really certain that it is the other who must change?
This appendix grows out of that question.
The journey moves through three forms of the same story: the Jātaka in its essential structure, its narrative transformation through the figure of Gerardo Santo, and finally a postscript devoted to another Gerardo, Gerard Majella, whose historical story belongs to a completely different plane, yet can symbolically resonate with the themes of departure and transformation.
The movement is:
force → speech → relationship → reflection → listening → silence.
1. The Ox That Would Not Move
The Sāraṃbha-Jātaka in its essential form
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| “The Ox That Would Not Move” |
Suggested cover: the ox standing still before the cart, the uphill road, the man trying to make it move, and a reflective surface or horizontal waterline in the background.
The first video:
Video title:
The Bull That Would Not Move | Sārambha-Jātaka (Full Story)
The first video returns the story to its essential structure.
A man must lead his cart along a road. The animal refuses to move. The man responds with force, impatience and harsh words. Yet the more he insists, the more completely the situation remains still.
The defeat is not merely material.
The man loses a wager, but with it he also loses a certainty: the belief that willpower, when sufficiently strong, should be able to overcome every form of resistance.
The second attempt introduces a minimal but decisive variation. The ox is approached differently, with different words and a different attitude toward the relationship.
The result changes.
The Ox as Mirror
The power of the story lies precisely in its simplicity.
The ox is not transformed.
It is not trained.
It is not subdued through a more effective technique.
It is the man who must change the way he stands before the ox.
From a Jungian perspective, the animal may become a figure of the Shadow: what the ego experiences as an external obstacle may contain something the ego does not wish to recognize within itself.
The immobile ox becomes a reflective surface.
The man believes he is encountering an external resistance; in fact, he encounters his own way of exercising power.
The aggression he attributes to the animal returns to him.
The other's impatience becomes a reflection of his own impatience.
The resistance of the world becomes a question addressed to the ego:
what would happen if, before asking the other to move, I changed the way I stand before the other?
2. Gerardo Santo and the Ox of the Mirror
From Parable to Narrative Transformation
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| “Gerardo Santo and the Ox of the Mirror” |
Gerardo beside the large ox, the eighteenth-century road, the domed tower in the distance and a body of water reflecting the scene.
The second video: https://youtu.be/1_vH9hnMs8A
Video title:
88. SĀRAMBHA-JĀTAKA — Gerardo Santo and the Ox of the Mirror | Full Story
In the narrative version, the simple episode of the ox becomes a journey through eighteenth-century Italy.
Gerardo Santo transports medicines with a cart drawn by a large ox. He is accustomed to giving orders, convinced that determination should immediately produce obedience.
When the animal stops on the uphill road, Gerardo reacts as he always has: he pulls the reins, raises his voice and uses the whip.
But the ox does not move.
The first defeat opens a crack.
The old Matteo tells him:
“An ox does not change. But you can change.”
This sentence, more than the second trial itself, becomes the true centre of the story.
The Whip Laid Down
Gerardo's decisive gesture is not finding a better command.
It is laying down the whip.
The gesture appears small, yet symbolically it is radical.
The whip represents the ego's attempt to control what stands before it.
To lay it down means to subtract something.
Not to add.
Not to acquire a new technique.
Not to discover a more effective formula.
To remove violence.
When Gerardo places his hand on the ox and speaks without commanding, the relationship changes.
Not because the ox suddenly becomes obedient.
But because, for the first time, Gerardo enters into relationship.
A Different Voice
From that moment, the transformation extends beyond the ox.
Gerardo begins to notice the way he speaks to the apothecary, the servant, the messenger boy, the beggar he meets along the road.
The discovery is uncomfortable:
violence is not only found in the whip.
It may also be found in the voice.
In haste.
In the assumption that we already know what the other must do.
In the word spoken before we have listened.
The ox thus becomes an unconscious teacher.
It does not teach through a sentence.
It teaches through stillness.
The Second Wager
The second trial brings Gerardo before a long line of carts loaded with stone.
This time he does not simply wager on the animal's strength.
He wagers on his own way of speaking to it.
The difference is fundamental.
The first time, Gerardo wanted to obtain a result.
The second time, he accepts entering into a relationship.
And when the line of carts slowly begins to move, the victory does not belong to the ox alone.
It belongs to the transformation of the relationship.
The Upside-Down City
After the climb, Gerardo looks down upon the city.
Houses, towers, windows and signs are reflected in the water.
The same reality now appears in two forms:
above and below, visible and reflected, direct and inverted.
Here the story reaches its most explicitly symbolic dimension.
The upside-down city is also an upside-down consciousness.
What Gerardo believed he was seeing outside begins to appear within.
The ox was no longer simply an animal refusing to obey.
It had become a mirror.
The Tower and the Threshold
The tower that accompanies the story returns in Gerardo's dream.
Above and below the surface of the water there are two images of the same structure.
But which one is real?
The question receives no answer.
And this is precisely the point.
The apophatic dimension of the story begins when the image is no longer sufficient.
Gerardo does not need to replace one certainty with another.
He must learn to remain before what cannot be completely said.
Speech becomes a threshold.
Between speaker and listener.
Between ego and other.
Between what we believe we know and what we do not yet know.
3. The Word Before the Word
The epilogue carries this transformation to its limit.
Gerardo imagines a page containing a horizontal line, the tower, its reflection and the ox.
Then a word appears:
kindness.
But even this word is erased.
What remains is whiteness.
This is perhaps the most radically apophatic point of the entire story.
After learning that words can wound or accompany, Gerardo discovers that even the right word can become another possession of the ego.
The final word must therefore be released.
What remains is what comes before the word:
listening.
Pause.
Availability.
The silence in which the other can finally appear without being immediately defined.
4. S.-Gerardo-va-a-farsi-santo
Postscript — Another Gerardo, Another Form of Departure
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| “S.-Gerardo-va-a-farsi-santo” |
A young figure symbolically leaving a house, a window, a bedsheet transformed into a rope, and a road opening toward the unknown. Eighteenth-century atmosphere, restrained and spiritual, without conventional devotional imagery.
The third video: https://youtu.be/am846pBeko8
Video title:
S.-Gerardo-va-a-farsi-santo
At this point the story changes level.
The Gerardo of this postscript is no longer the fictional protagonist of the ox story.
He is Gerard Majella, a historical figure of eighteenth-century Italy.
The distinction is important.
Gerardo Santo is a narrative and symbolic character created for this reinterpretation of the Sāraṃbha-Jātaka.
Gerard Majella belongs to the history of Italian spirituality.
The two figures must not be confused.
Their relationship is symbolic, not biographical.
Two Gerardos and One Word: Departure
In Gerardo Santo's story, transformation begins when he lays down the whip.
In Gerard Majella's story, transformation takes another radical form: leaving home and moving toward a vocation.
In 1749, at Muro Lucano, the young Gerard Majella wished to follow the Redemptorists. After opposition from his mother, he decided to leave.
Tradition associates his departure with the words:
“Mother, forgive me, I am going to become a saint.”
The decisive word is become.
Not “I am a saint.”
Not “I want to be recognized as a saint.”
I am going to become a saint.
Holiness thus appears as a process, a journey, a transformation still in progress.
The Whip and the Bedsheet
The symbolic parallel between the two stories can be expressed through two objects.
The whip.
The bedsheet.
Gerardo Santo must lay down the whip so that he can change his relationship with the other.
Gerard Majella uses a bedsheet to leave his home and follow the direction he feels called toward.
The whip can be read as a symbol of control over the other.
The bedsheet, by contrast, becomes a symbol of detachment from what holds one back.
One must stop forcing.
The other must stop remaining.
Both begin to change when something is released.
5. A Resonance, Not an Identification
The meaning of placing these two figures together is not to turn Gerardo Santo into a fictionalized version of Gerard Majella.
That would be reductive.
The relationship is subtler.
Gerardo Santo follows a primarily psychological and relational journey.
He learns to recognize aggression, projection and the need for control.
Gerard Majella follows a vocational and spiritual journey.
He leaves one configuration of life to follow a calling.
One learns to speak differently to the other.
The other learns to respond differently to his own destiny.
One changes his relationship with the ox.
The other changes his relationship with life itself.
Yet both reveal a common structure:
transformation begins when what prevents movement is released.
6. The Test of Virtue and Reciprocity
This episode belongs to the second level of the series:
The Test of Virtue and Reciprocity
Following the reflection of the Sīlavīmaṃsana-Jātaka 86, in which virtue is sought beyond public image, the Sāraṃbha-Jātaka 88 moves the question into the field of relationship.
It is not enough to appear good.
It is not enough to possess a good reputation.
It is not enough to know what is right.
Virtue must become a concrete quality of relationship.
In the first story, the test concerns the real value of conduct when public image is challenged.
In the second, it concerns the quality of speech when the power of command fails.
Kindness is not presented merely as good manners.
It is a form of knowledge.
It means recognizing that the other is not simply an object to be moved according to our will.
Reciprocity begins when the other ceases to be merely the recipient of our action and becomes a presence with whom we enter into relationship.
7. Three Videos, One Journey
The three works can therefore be read as three movements of the same journey.
1. The Ox That Would Not Move
The Jātaka in its essential form.
Force fails.
Speech changes.
Relationship becomes possible.
2. Gerardo Santo and the Ox of the Mirror
The narrative transforms the parable into a psychological journey.
The ox becomes a mirror.
The road becomes a threshold.
The city turns upside down.
Speech slowly leads toward silence.
3. S.-Gerardo-va-a-farsi-santo
The story opens toward a historical and spiritual resonance.
Another Gerardo departs.
Not to dominate a road, but to leave a home.
Not to command another being, but to answer a calling.
Three videos.
Three perspectives.
One question:
what must be released for a new direction to appear?
8. When the Ox Is No Longer Just an Ox
At the end of the story, the ox is no longer merely an ox.
But neither does it simply become a symbol.
It remains an animal.
It remains the concrete body of an animal that, at the beginning, would not move.
This concreteness is precisely what makes the symbol possible.
The story does not ask us to escape reality in search of a hidden meaning.
It asks us to look differently at what stands before us.
The resistance of the other can become a question.
Stillness can become a threshold.
Speech can become listening.
And silence can become the space in which relationship finally breathes.
Gerardo does not conquer the ox.
Gerardo stops trying to conquer it.
This is his true victory.
And perhaps this is where the Sāraṃbha-Jātaka moves beyond morality and becomes experience.
When something refuses to move, we can increase the force.
Or we can stop.
Look.
Listen.
And ask:
what in me is still trying to force the world to move?
Perhaps the ox did not need to change.
Perhaps the voice needed to change.
Perhaps, in the end, even the voice had to disappear.
And only the road remained.
Note on the postscript
Gerardo Santo is a fictional and symbolic character created for this reinterpretation of the Sāraṃbha-Jātaka. Gerard Majella is a historical figure. Their juxtaposition does not establish a biographical identity, but proposes a symbolic resonance between two different forms of transformation and departure.
