Babbu Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, No. 137 of the Ekanipāta of the Khuddaka Nikāya, while dwelling at Jetavana, concerning a devout lay-sister whose daughter was called Kāṇā. Kāṇā used to visit her mother's village, but each time she tried to return to her husband, four monks arrived at the house for alms, and her mother delayed Kāṇā's departure so she could first bake fresh cakes for them. This happened again and again until Kāṇā's husband, tired of waiting, took another wife. When the monks learned they had caused this sorrow, the Buddha told them it was not the first time these same four had parted a woman from her household.

Long ago, in the days of King Brahmadatta of Benares, the Bodhisatta earned his living as a humble stone-cutter. In that city there once lived a merchant's wife who, though wealthy, was so attached to her buried gold that after death she was reborn as a mouse and continued to dwell directly above the very spot where forty crores (a crore being ten million, so an immense fortune) of her family's treasure lay hidden.

One day the mouse noticed the stone-cutter working nearby and, moved by a flicker of the merchant-wife's old shrewdness, she brought him a single gold coin and asked him to bring her meat in return. The stone-cutter agreed, and from then on the mouse paid him daily for his service, and he kept her fed. It was an arrangement of simple mutual benefit, with no claim yet on the treasure beneath her feet.

Before long, a cat caught the mouse as she slipped out from her hiding place. Terrified, she begged for her life and promised the cat a share of her food if it would let her go. The cat agreed, and from that day the mouse had to set aside part of what the stone-cutter brought her as a ransom payment to her captor.

The arrangement did not end there. One by one, three more cats caught her in the same way, and each time she bought her freedom with the same promise of a continuing share of meat. Soon the unfortunate mouse was dividing her daily provision among five mouths — her own and those of four demanding cats — and she grew thin and weak from hunger, for what little meat she received had to be split five ways.

The Bodhisatta, who still received his coin each day, could not help but see how gaunt and anxious the mouse had become. When he asked her the reason, she confessed the whole truth: four cats now held her to ransom, and she could no longer keep enough food for herself to stay healthy.

Taking pity on her, the stone-cutter fashioned a small chamber of clear crystal with just one narrow opening, through which the mouse alone could pass but no cat could follow. He set her safely inside it. When the four cats came as usual expecting their due, the mouse, protected for the first time, spoke boldly to them from within her crystal walls and refused to be cowed any longer.

Enraged at losing their hold over her, each cat in turn hurled itself against the crystal chamber, trying to force its way in or to strike at the mouse through the stone. Unable to break through, each cat instead injured itself badly against the hard crystal surface in its blind fury, and one after another the four attackers came to grief through their own violence rather than through any act of the mouse.

Freed at last from her tormentors, the mouse remembered the stone-cutter's kindness and led him to the very spot beneath her old dwelling where the forty crores of buried treasure lay. The honest stone-cutter, who had asked for nothing beyond his daily coin, now found himself raised from poverty through the mouse's gratitude, and he used the wealth wisely for the rest of his life.

When the tale was finished, the Buddha identified the participants for the assembled monks: the four cats who had cornered the mouse and demanded tribute were the same four monks who had delayed Kāṇā's return to her husband; the mouse, once a merchant's wife bound by attachment to her own gold, was Kāṇā's mother; and the wise, patient stone-cutter who sheltered the helpless and was rewarded for his honesty was the Bodhisatta himself.

The Babbu Jātaka is remembered less as a tale of clever diplomacy than as a teaching on how attachment binds beings across lifetimes and how honest kindness, offered without any demand for more than a fair exchange, is eventually repaid many times over. The mouse's suffering under four successive demands mirrors the way greed and fear multiply when one tries to buy off danger piecemeal rather than seeking real protection, while the stone-cutter's crystal refuge shows that a single wise and simple act of shelter can undo threats that endless small concessions never could. In the frame story, the same four monks who once were predatory cats are shown, lifetimes later, still capable of disrupting a household through their own appetite, reminding the Jetavana community that old patterns of behavior persist until they are recognized and transformed.