Bhūripañha Jātaka

The Bhuripanha Jataka of the Pali Canon, numbered 452 among the Buddha's birth stories, is told when the monks speak of the Buddha's wisdom and the Buddha shows that he was wise in earlier lives too. Its hero is the sage Mahosadha, the Bodhisatta, whose full story is told in the long Mahaummagga Jataka (No. 546). The Great Question of the title, a riddle put to the king's wise men by a deity living in the royal parasol, is told fully in that longer tale; here the story begins after Mahosadha has been wronged and concerns what follows.

A king had unjustly defeated the wise Mahosadha, and then found his own fears impossible to calm. His advisers could not settle his unease. So he sent four courtiers, one out of each city gate, with orders to find Mahosadha, honour him, and bring him back.

Three of the courtiers returned with nothing. The fourth went out by the south gate and found Mahosadha in a southern town, working as a potter. He had dug the clay and turned the wheel himself, and he sat muddy on a bundle of straw, eating rice balls with a little soup. He lived this way so that the king would never suspect him of wanting power.

The courtier, who belonged to the party of Senaka, mocked him with a verse from the Bhuripanha, asking whether he could truly be so profoundly wise when he had fallen so low. Mahosadha answered that he could restore his prosperity whenever he chose, through the strength of his wisdom, that he was content with simple food for now, and that he would act when the time was right.

The courtier explained that a deity living in the king's parasol had put a question that the king's wise men could not answer. Mahosadha spoke in praise of wisdom over wealth. He then took leave of the household where he had been working, consoled his frightened employer, and gave the potter a thousand pieces of money.

Mahosadha came before the king still muddy from the wheel. The king reasoned that an enemy would have come with pomp and a retinue, so this man could not be an enemy. He ordered Mahosadha bathed, dressed, and brought back in due state.

The king then tested him with a verse on why people avoid wrongdoing, and why Mahosadha did not harm the king though he had the power to. Mahosadha replied that wise people do not do wrong for pleasure, and that good people keep to what is right whether they act toward friend or foe. The king spoke of rising from a low station into righteousness, and Mahosadha answered with a simile of a tree: to cut a branch of the tree that has sheltered you is treachery, so to harm the king who had protected his father would be far worse. Having affirmed his loyalty, he went on to rebuke the king. He condemned the idle sensual layman and the false ascetic, warned that a bad king decides cases without hearing them, and said that a sage's anger cannot be justified. He closed with the verse that a warrior-prince who weighs his judgments with care wins lasting fame.

The Jataka identifies the Bodhisatta as the wise Mahosadha. It names Suddhodana as his father in that life and Mahamaya as his mother, and Bimbasundari, given there as Amara, as his wife.

The story praises wisdom over prosperity. A man who has lost his position and wealth, living as a potter in the mud, is still the wiser party, because wisdom can win back what fortune takes away, while a king who judges unjustly and in fear gains nothing by his power. It is also a lesson in loyalty and fair dealing: Mahosadha does not use the king's wrong as an excuse to harm him, and he tells the king plainly where the fault lay.