Cammasataka Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning a monk of Savatthi who wore a leather jacket and was known as Cammasataka, the Leather-Clad One. While going for alms, the monk came to the place where rams were set to fight. A ram drew back as if to charge, and the monk took this for a gesture of respect and stood his ground. The ram charged, struck his thigh, and knocked him down, and the monk died of the blow. The news spread through the Sangha, and the monks spoke of it in the Dhamma Hall. The Buddha told them that this monk had made the very same mistake in a former life. Jataka No. 324 of the Pali Canon preserves that earlier tale.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was a wise merchant, quick to see danger before it struck. At that time a wandering mendicant clad in a leather garment, the same Cammasataka of the later telling, was going about the city for alms, content in the belief that his ascetic bearing commanded reverence from all who saw him.

As the mendicant went begging, he came upon a ram. Seeing the leather-clad figure approach, the ram retreated several paces, exactly the motion a ram makes before it charges, in order to gain the impetus for its attack.

Blind to what the animal was really doing, the mendicant took the retreat for homage. In his first verse he praised the ram as an honest creature, the most famous of beasts, that bowed down before a learned brahmin, and he stood waiting to receive its supposed reverence.

The Bodhisatta, sitting in his storehouse, saw what was about to happen and called out a warning in his own verse. The ram was not bowing, he said; it was drawing back only to gather force for its attack, and the mendicant should not trust it. The mendicant paid no heed to the warning.

The ram sprang forward and struck him down. His leg was broken and his bowl was overturned. In the dust, the mendicant lamented in a fourth verse that to honor the unworthy brings exactly the fate he now suffered, and that his own foolish confidence had brought him to his death. Having spoken it, he died on the spot.

The story gives no rescue and no change of heart. The merchant's warning was plain and was refused, and the refusal cost the mendicant his life. The verse spoken of the fallen man's broken leg and spilled bowl urges that help should have been sent before he was killed, a reminder that counsel is worth most before the blow falls and not after.

What makes the Buddha's choice to recall this story so pointed is the repetition itself. The monk of Savatthi had made the same error in the same kind of leather garment, mistaking an animal's backing away for a gesture of respect, and he too was struck down by the ram. The pattern suggests this is not an unusual lapse but an ordinary temptation for anyone who is certain of his own standing.

The merchant's warning asked almost nothing of the mendicant: only to doubt his own flattering reading of the ram's movement and to stand aside. The real cost of his vanity was his certainty that he was being honored, a certainty that held until the ram moved exactly as it had meant to move all along.

Concluding the telling at Jetavana, the Buddha identified the birth for the assembled monks: the leather-clad mendicant of the past was the same man as the leather-clad monk of the present, who had lately met his death in the same way, and the wise merchant who had warned him in vain was the Buddha himself.