Citta-Sambhuta Jataka

The Master told this story concerning two monks deeply devoted to one another, drawing on an ancient bond that had carried the same two souls through far more lifetimes than this one. Jataka No. 498 of the Pali Canon preserves the earlier tale that reveals how far back that devotion actually reached.

In their first remembered birth together, Citta and Sambhuta were cousins, the sons of two sisters, born in an outcaste village near the city of Ujjeni in Avanti. The wise one was Citta. When the two young men displayed their outcaste skills at the city gate, they were taken for an ill omen and beaten by an angry crowd. Resolving to hide their origin, they traveled to Takkasila and studied there as brahmin students, but their caste was eventually revealed through their native dialect, and they were beaten and driven away, told to become ascetics.

They lived as forest ascetics and, passing from that life, were reborn together as two fawns on the banks of the Neranjara river, inseparable in every moment, until a single hunter's javelin took both lives at once. After that they arose as two ospreys on the river Narmada, again always side by side, until a bird-catcher snared and killed them both.

In their next human birth, the fruits of their past lives finally ripened in very different directions. Sambhuta was born to royal station and grew up to become king of Uttarapancala, ruling from the city of Kampilla in comfort and increasing indulgence. Citta was born instead into the household of a royal chaplain in Kosambi, and in that life he was the Bodhisatta himself.

Citta was born with the rare gift of remembering all his own past lives, and this memory showed him with total clarity how perilous and endless the cycle of rebirth truly was. He renounced the household life while still young, took up the homeless life of an ascetic, mastered the meditative absorptions, and developed the higher knowledges that came from that attainment.

After fifty years of Sambhuta's reign, Citta turned his awareness toward his companion of many lifetimes and saw him still ruling as king. Citta flew to the royal park, where a boy gathering sticks was singing the hymn Sambhuta had composed on his coronation day, which the whole city had taken up as the king's favorite. Citta learned that the boy knew only this one song, and taught him a verse to sing in answer before the king.

The boy sang the answering verse at court, and the king, realizing that it could only have come from his old companion, set out with his retinue for the park to find Citta himself. He greeted the ascetic warmly, offered him a seat, and welcomed him with the affection of one who had shared countless lives with him.

Sambhuta offered to share his kingdom with Citta, but Citta declined. He spoke of the fruit of deeds, the brevity of human life, the certainty of death, and the outcaste birth they had once shared, and urged the king to give up harmful deeds, since neither old age nor death allows any escape. The king admitted that his desires were too strong to abandon, and Citta advised him to rule justly and to support ascetics and brahmins. Then Citta rose into the air and departed for the Himalayas. Moved by his brother's teaching, Sambhuta gave his kingdom to his eldest son, went to the Himalayas, and was ordained by Citta, where both developed the meditative absorptions and higher knowledges and were destined for the Brahma realm, a heaven of long-lived divine beings.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that Ananda had been Sambhuta in that former life, and that he himself had been the wise Citta. A friendship strong enough to survive outcaste birth, animal form, a hunter's javelin and a bird-catcher's snare proved, in the end, strong enough to survive a throne as well. What makes the story's final turn so striking is that the king, who first confessed that his desires were too strong to give up, was in the end moved by his old companion's few words to lay down everything a kingdom could offer.