The account of the cowherd and the ear-pegs is preserved in the Jain canon and it is the tradition's least comfortable story about its own founder. During the twelve and a half years of Mahavira's ascetic wandering he was, the texts say, abused repeatedly — set upon by villagers, bitten by dogs, taken for a spy. In the final and worst episode, a cowherd left his cattle in the care of the standing, silent Mahavira; the cattle wandered; the man returned, found them gone, blamed him, and drove sharpened pegs of kasha grass or iron into both ears with a stone, cutting the protruding ends off so they could not be seen. Mahavira did not react and continued. Later a merchant named Siddhartha and a physician named Kharaka noticed the discoloration, understood, held him, applied oil, and pulled the pegs out with tongs — and the account records that he cried out, a cry so terrible that the grove is said to have shaken. The tradition could have removed that detail and did not. The interpretation offered is that endurance is not the absence of pain, and that the karma being shed was earned in a previous life in which he had poured molten lead in a servant's ears.