Asankiya Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning a lay disciple of Savatthi who had entered the Paths. Travelling with a merchant caravan, he spent a night pacing in walking meditation beneath a tree near the caravan leader's camp. Five hundred robbers had surrounded the camp to plunder it, but they took him for a sentry and waited for him to fall asleep. He never did. Through the first, middle, and last watches he kept pacing, and at dawn the robbers abandoned their weapons and fled. Returning to Savatthi, the layman asked the Buddha whether a man who guards himself also guards others, and the Buddha affirmed that he does. Then the Master told a story of the past. This is Jataka No. 76 of the Pali Canon.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as a brahmin. Having seen the dangers of sensual desire, he left the household life and became a hermit in the countryside near the Himalayas.

When he needed salt and vinegar, the hermit set out on an almsround and fell in with a merchant caravan. The travellers made camp in a forest, and the Bodhisatta, absorbed in the bliss of meditation, paced up and down beneath a tree close by.

After the evening meal, the robbers arrived. They saw the pacing hermit and decided to wait until he lay down to sleep before they attacked the camp.

But the Bodhisatta did not sleep. He walked on through the first watch, through the middle watch, and into the last, calm and unbroken in his meditation, and the robbers' waiting came to nothing.

Giving up, the robbers threw down their weapons and shouted to the travellers that the ascetic's pacing had saved them. In the morning the caravan people found the discarded weapons and, frightened, asked the Bodhisatta whether he had seen the robbers. He said that he had. When they asked whether he had not been afraid, he replied that robbers frighten only those who have wealth, whereas he owned nothing and so had nothing to fear, in village or in forest.

To teach the Dhamma to the caravan people, the Bodhisatta then spoke a verse: he had no suspicion in the village and no fear in the wilds, for by loving-kindness and compassion he had mounted the straight path. The commentary explains that this straight path is the meditative absorption on loving-kindness and compassion, free of crookedness in body, speech, and mind, and leading toward the Brahma world.

The caravan people were calmed and honoured him. For the rest of his life the Bodhisatta cultivated the four Divine Abidings, and at death he was reborn in the Brahma world. The Buddha closed the story by identifying the characters: the caravan people were his followers of that time, and the ascetic was himself.

The story's answer to the layman's question is shown, not argued: the sage did nothing to the robbers except keep his own mind steady and kind, and that steadiness protected a whole caravan. His own words name its source as a heart of loving-kindness and compassion, so that neither village nor wilderness holds a threat for him. Here, in the Jataka's telling, guarding oneself is not selfish at all.

The layman of Savatthi had lived the same truth on a smaller scale: he had only been pacing beneath a tree, mindful and awake, and the robbers who came to plunder the caravan could find no opening. The Buddha set the layman's night beside the Bodhisatta's long ago so that the listeners could see one pattern across lifetimes. A mind trained in watchfulness and kindness needs no weapon, and its calm reaches everyone who happens to be sheltered near it. The caravan people, who had slept through the danger, learned of it only from the weapons lying on the ground at dawn.