Parable 14: The Wise Jackal

The Buddha was once born as a jackal, and he made his home in the cremation fields amidst the corpses.
A wicked man who wanted to kill the jackal had gone there and lay on the ground, club in hand, pretending to be dead.
The jackal approached, but he suspected this man was not really dead, so he grabbed the club in his teeth and tugged. The man tightened his grip, and the jackal let go.“Human, if you were dead, you wouldn’t have tightened your grip.”
The man then sprang up, but he was too late: the Buddha had escaped. 

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This is yet another one of the Buddha's past-birth stories, a "jataka" tale; this one is known as the Sigala-Jataka (sigala means "jackal" in Pali). I like the fact that the Buddha would be reborn as a jackal, a creature who does not get a lot of respect, and as a jackal he dwells in the cremation grounds, the most lowly place a creature could be. And I guess you could say that the man pretending to be dead was still "grasping" ... he had not learned to pretend to be a good Buddhist even in death! Meanwhile, the deceitful man was the wicked Devadatta in a past life; more about Devadatta at Wikipedia.

Indian painting of a jackal and peacocks