The hungry tigress.
A prince walking in the forest found a tigress starving beside cubs she was too weak to feed and about to eat. He sent his companions ahead, lay down at the foot of the cliff, and let her have him. The tale is told to children, painted at Dunhuang, and used by teachers to open the argument it is designed to open: whether this is the perfection of giving or an evasion of the harder work of staying alive and useful.
The tigress story is the standard test case for the perfection of giving, and Buddhist teachers use it as a test case rather than a model. Read one way it is the logical end of taking all sentient beings as equal to yourself. Read another it is spiritual bypassing with a body count of one, since a living practitioner could have fed that tigress for years. The tradition mostly holds that such acts are appropriate only for advanced bodhisattvas and are actively discouraged for anyone else — which is a way of preserving the story's force while defusing its instruction.
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