The main entry's passing reference to "the tale of Vessantara for giving" understates how central, and how ethically troubling, this story is within the Theravada perfection scheme, since it is the most popular Jataka across Theravada Southeast Asia and also the one generating the most sustained internal moral discomfort.
Prince Vessantara, in his final life before becoming the bodhisatta who would be born as the historical Buddha, is renowned for a vow of total generosity, giving away a rain-bringing white elephant, his wealth, and, in the story's most disturbing episode, his own two children to a Brahmin who demands them as servants, and subsequently his wife, before the children are ransomed and the family reunited. The story is recited over several days as a major festival in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, and treated as the supreme demonstration of generosity precisely because it depicts a gift so extreme ordinary moral instincts recoil from it.
The story has drawn sustained ethical discussion over whether giving away one's children can exemplify a virtue rather than a failure: commentators note the children are given, not sold, that Vessantara weeps and suffers real anguish, and that the story establishes an extreme, unreachable benchmark rather than a literal behavioral model, a tension its enduring popularity has not resolved so much as absorbed.