Bharu Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana to King Pasenadi of Kosala, after sectarian ascetics, losing honor and gifts to the Sangha, had bribed the king with a hundred thousand pieces of money to let them build a rival settlement near Jetavana. Ananda heard the noise of the building and the Buddha called the site unsuitable; the bribed king would not receive the monks sent to stop it, and the Buddha went to the palace himself. He warned that kings who take bribes and set the virtuous against one another lose their kingdoms, and told this tale. Jataka No. 213 of the Pali Canon preserves the ancient tale the Buddha offered as a caution, a story about how far a single act of royal favoritism, bought rather than earned, can travel once it is set in motion.

In the maritime kingdom of Bharu, ruled by a king who shared its name, the Bodhisatta led a community of five hundred ascetics. They had settled beneath a great banyan tree on the northern edge of the port city, drawn there by its cool, spreading shade. A separate community of ascetics had settled beneath a different tree to the south.

When the southern tree eventually withered and its shade failed, the ascetics who had depended on it looked toward the still-flourishing northern tree where the Bodhisatta's community lived, and resolved to claim it for their own rather than search elsewhere for shelter. The two communities, each convinced of its own right to the one tree still offering real shade, brought their dispute before King Bharu to settle.

The king at first ruled in favor of the ascetics who had come first, the Bodhisatta's community. The newcomers then found, through their supernatural vision, a chariot body fit for an emperor and offered it to the king as a bribe, and he allowed them to share the tree. The Bodhisatta's community answered by offering the chariot's jeweled wheels and asking for sole possession, and the king granted it. Between them the two communities had turned a patch of shade into a bidding contest, and the king had shown that his justice went to whoever paid more.

Once the bidding was over, the ascetics on both sides, each having taken part in the bribing, came to recognize the dispute itself as beneath them. It was an unworthy attachment to a patch of shade that had led holy men into exactly the kind of worldly grasping they had renounced the world to escape. Filled with remorse at their own part in it, they gave up the quarrel entirely and returned together to the Himalayas. They would not remain in a kingdom that had shown them so plainly what their own greed could still be bought and sold for.

The guardian deities of the land and the spirits of the ocean, witnessing a king trade away justice itself for a bribe, could not let the offense stand unanswered. That very night the sea swelled beyond its banks and broke through the coastal defenses. Within the space of a single night's three watches, it swallowed the entire kingdom of Bharu, its palace, its corrupt king, and every trace of the dispute that had set the whole catastrophe in motion.

Only the Bodhisatta and his fellow ascetics, already far away in the Himalayas by the time the sea rose, were spared the fate that overtook the kingdom they had left behind. Their survival was not a reward for having been in the right in the original dispute, since both sides had been tangled in the same unworthy grasping. It was a consequence of having recognized that grasping for what it was and walked away from it before the king's corruption brought the whole matter to its final, drowning conclusion.

Pasenadi, hearing this story after himself selling royal favor to sectarian ascetics, received in it something more pointed than a simple warning against bribery. The tale shows that a king's corrupt judgment can ruin not only the parties who paid for it but an entire kingdom indifferent to the dispute. It shows in the same breath that the ascetics on both sides bore responsibility too, for having let a shaded tree matter enough to bribe a king over. A king tempted to grant special favor to one party over another, the story suggests, should weigh what that favor might cost the losing side. He should weigh, too, what it might eventually cost everyone standing anywhere near the kingdom when the debt for that favor finally comes due.