Culla Narada Jataka

At Jetavana, a young monk had grown so discontented with the robes that he stood on the edge of abandoning them entirely. A laywoman of Savatthi, noticing his vanity, had used her own daughter to draw his attention away from his vows, and the monk's companions, alarmed at how close he had come to leaving, brought him before the Buddha. The Buddha told him that this was not the first time such a temptation had nearly cost him everything; he had faced the very same trial once before, in a far older life, and he told the whole of that older story.

In that former age, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a wealthy brahmin family. After his beloved wife died, he saw clearly how fleeting and anxious every worldly pleasure truly was, and he renounced his fortune and withdrew into the forests of the Himalayas, taking with him his infant son, whom he named Culla Narada (Culla being Pali for young or lesser, distinguishing him from an elder ascetic of the same name). There the two built a simple hermitage of bark and leaves beside a lotus pool and lived on wild roots and fruit, developing deep meditative power together as the boy grew to know nothing of cities, money, or women.

When Culla Narada had reached sixteen years, a band of raiders struck a nearby border village, and in the chaos a young woman became separated from her family and wandered deep into the hills. She came upon the hermitage clearing while the Bodhisatta was away gathering fruit, and found there a youth who had never once seen a woman in his life.

Recognizing at once how little the boy understood of the world, she drew close to him with songs, scent, and the plain fact of her presence. Culla Narada had nothing in his own experience to measure her against, and was swept entirely off balance. She painted the pleasures of city life in vivid colors and urged him to leave the forest with her that very evening. He agreed to go, asking only to wait until his father returned so that he might say farewell.

When the Bodhisatta came back with his basket of fruit, he found his son sitting beside a cold, neglected hearth, the wood unchopped and no water drawn from the pool, trembling and unable to eat. Rather than demand an explanation, he asked only what had changed. Culla Narada confessed through tears that a woman had entered his heart so completely that he could no longer bear to remain in the forest and meant to follow her into the life of a householder.

The Bodhisatta did not scold his son for what had happened to him. He sat beside him instead and described, without softening any part of it, exactly what the life Culla Narada now longed for put in his path. He warned him, in the language of the countryside, of the places a traveler must not go: the precipice, the poison and the mud, and the paths where snakes lie. The precipice, he explained, is woman, who bewilders the foolish and seizes young hearts; the poison is wine, which the wise call poison for those who have gone forth; the mud is honor, respect, fame and gain; and the snakes are kings, before whose feet no ascetic should walk. He added that one should eat only what is offered in good measure, keep clear of idle gossip, drink and lewd company, and give up sensual desire.

As his father's plain account replaced the woman's painted promises in his mind, Culla Narada felt the infatuation that had gripped him begin to loosen. He fell at his father's feet in gratitude, saying he had been pulled back from a torrent he had very nearly drowned in, and vowed never again to trade the lasting good of his training for so fleeting a pleasure. The woman, seeing her scheme undone by the father's wisdom, vanished back into the forest she had come from. Culla Narada renewed his vows, and father and son together deepened their meditation until both were reborn in the Brahma heaven (a long-lived celestial realm attained through deep meditative absorption).

The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the figures within it for the troubled monk before him. The girl whose charms had just been used to tempt this very monk, he said, was the same woman who had once tempted the hermit's son. The monk himself had been Culla Narada, caught the same way twice across two different lives. The Buddha himself had been the father whose plain, unflinching counsel had called his son back from the edge both times. Jataka No. 477 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.