Asātarūpa Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 100 of the Ekanipata as recorded in the Pali Canon, concerning Suppavasa, a king's daughter and devout lay-sister who endured seven years of pregnancy and then seven days of agonizing labor before giving birth to her son. Despite her suffering, she kept unwavering faith in the Buddha and the Dhamma throughout, and the infant Sivali, born at last, was said to have discoursed on religion with the elder Sariputta at only seven days old. The Buddha related a tale from a previous birth to explain why a devotee so faithful had been made to suffer so severely in her delivery.

During the reign of King Brahmadatta, the Bodhisatta served as the king of Benares's own son, and upon his father's death became king in turn. The King of Kosala invaded Benares with a great army, killed the Bodhisatta in battle, and took the slain king's queen for his own wife, seizing the city along with her.

The young prince, son of the slain king, escaped the fall of the city and gathered an army in exile, determined to reclaim his father's throne from the invader now occupying it. Rather than risk his soldiers against the city's fortifications directly, the prince hesitated over how to proceed, and in secret his own mother, still held within the captured city as the Kosalan king's wife, sent him counsel.

Her advice was precise: let every approach to the city be invested and barred on every side, cutting off firewood, water, and food, until deprivation alone wore down the people within rather than the sword. The prince followed his mother's counsel exactly, surrounding Benares on all sides and sealing every route by which supplies might reach it.

For seven days the blockade held, and as hunger and thirst spread through the city, the citizens turned against the Kosalan king who had taken their former queen and their throne by force. On the seventh day they cut off his head themselves and carried it out to the waiting prince, surrendering the city and restoring him to the throne his father had held before him.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Sivali had been the prince who blockaded the city and reclaimed his father's throne, Suppavasa had been his mother, the queen whose counsel ended the siege without battle, and the Buddha himself had been the king of Benares slain at the story's opening. The seven days of the blockade, the Buddha explained, were answered across lifetimes by seven years of pregnancy and seven days of labor. A tactic that spared soldiers' lives by starving an entire city instead carried a karmic weight that fell, in time, upon the very woman who had devised it.

The jataka does not condemn the prince's reclaiming of his own throne. Nor does it treat the blockade as a worse choice than open slaughter at the walls, a point the frame story's own comparison to direct assault makes clear. What the tale insists on instead is that even a strategy chosen to minimize bloodshed in battle still inflicted prolonged suffering on an entire city's ordinary people. Such suffering, however tactically sound or militarily merciful by comparison, does not escape the working of kamma, the law of moral cause and effect, simply because it spared the clash of swords. The seven days a mother once imposed on others returned to her, lifetimes later, as seven years and seven days she alone had to bear.

The jataka's frame story does not end with the explanation of Suppavasa's suffering but continues into the birth itself, a detail that gives the tale its fuller shape. Sivali, once finally born after the seven years and seven days, is said to have been of remarkably calm and auspicious temperament from his very first moments. So composed and fortunate a child was he that his mother marked his birth by hosting the Buddha and the entire monastic community for seven days of offerings, one day of generosity for each day of her labor. Sivali himself grew to become an Arahant, a fully liberated being, renowned above all for his good fortune in receiving alms wherever he traveled. Buddhist tradition reads this as the karmic counterpart to his mother's own long ordeal, her extended suffering in birth answered, in the child she bore, by a life marked by unusual ease and abundance.