Buddhist tradition ranks generosity, dana, as the first of the ten perfections a being must cultivate on the long road toward enlightenment, and it tells one story more than any other to show what perfected generosity actually looks like. Prince Vessantara, the story goes, is so committed to giving that he gives away his kingdom's rain bringing white elephant to a neighboring, drought stricken land, an act his own people see as reckless and that gets him exiled from his father's kingdom.
This painting captures what happens next. On the road out of the city, still traveling by chariot, Vessantara meets four brahmins who ask him for the chariot itself. He gives it to them without hesitation and continues on foot, carrying his own children, his wife Maddi walking beside him. The story does not stop there either. By its end he will have given away his son and daughter and finally his wife, each gift tested and each gift completed, before the tale resolves the horror those later gifts provoke in nearly every listener who hears it.
The discomfort is not an accident of the storytelling. A story about giving a coin to a beggar illustrates generosity comfortably. A story about giving away a chariot on the way into exile, and then far more than a chariot, is built to locate the outer edge of the virtue, the point where generosity stops being comfortable and starts costing something that matters. Perfected dana, in this account, is not the giving that is easy. It is the giving that still happens when it is not.