Culla-Paduma Jātaka

The Culla-Paduma Jataka of the Pali Canon, numbered 193 among the Buddha's birth stories, was told at Jetavana to a monk whose resolve had weakened at the sight of a beautifully adorned woman passing through the city, a woman later named in the Buddha's closing identification as the laywoman Cinca. To show how far a fickle heart could carry someone who trusted it completely, the Buddha related this story of the past.

Long ago, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as his eldest son, Prince Paduma. Fearing that his sons might one day move against him, the king banished Paduma and his six younger brothers, along with their wives, into a trackless wilderness, sending them out with no provisions for the journey.

As the food ran out, hunger pressed harder on the brothers with each passing day, and one by one, over six terrible days, they took the lives of their own wives to survive. Each day, rather than let his own wife meet the same end, Paduma quietly set aside a portion of what the day provided. When the seventh day came and the brothers turned their hunger toward her, he was able to offer them his saved portions instead and spare her.

That night, once the others had fallen asleep, Paduma took his wife and slipped away into the wilderness alone, choosing flight over watching the same fate reach her that had already claimed six others.

Deep in the parched country beyond the camp, his wife collapsed from thirst and exhaustion. With nothing else to offer her, Paduma struck his own knee with his sword and let her drink from the wound until her strength returned enough to go on. Supporting her the rest of the way, he found a stretch of fertile land near the Ganges, built a hut of leaves, and settled there to recover and to care for her.

One day, Paduma found a man floating down the river in a basket, his hands, feet, nose, and ears all cut away as punishment for some past crime. Moved by compassion, Paduma carried the man to the hut, cleaned his wounds, and fed him daily through his recovery, never suspecting what his own wife would come to feel for the stranger he had saved.

In time, Paduma's wife turned her affection toward the helpless man she had watched her husband nurse back to health, and began looking for a way to be rid of the husband who stood between them. She told Paduma she had vowed to honor the spirit of a nearby mountain for his recovery, and led him up a steep path to its summit under that pretense.

At the top, she struck him from behind and hurled him over the edge, declaring that she had at last seen the back of her enemy. But Paduma did not die in the fall. He landed safely in the leafy branches of a fig tree growing from the cliffside, and an iguana living nearby carried him down through the mountain's hidden paths to level ground.

Word soon reached the wilderness that the old king of Benares had died, and the ministers who came searching for an heir found Paduma and brought him home to be crowned. As King Lotus, he founded six halls of charity across the city, giving away six hundred thousand pieces of money every day to any who had need of it.

Years later, the wife who had left Paduma for dead arrived in Benares, carrying the mutilated man in a basket on her head and begging from door to door. The citizens praised her for what looked like devotion to a crippled relative. Encouraged by their praise, she brought her basket before the famously generous King Lotus himself, not recognizing the husband she had once pushed from a cliff.

Before the whole court, King Lotus revealed who he was and who she was. He declared plainly that this was the very woman who had once let him feed her his own blood, only to hurl him from a mountain for the sake of the crippled man she now carried. Struck with terror at being recognized, she could find nothing to say in her own defense.

Though the court called for severe punishment, King Lotus tempered justice with mercy. He had the basket fastened to her head so firmly that she could never again set it down on her own, and sent her from the kingdom still carrying the very burden she had chosen over her husband's life.

Having finished the story, the Buddha revealed who its characters had been. The six brothers were certain elders among the monks, the treacherous wife was the laywoman Cinca, the mutilated man was Devadatta, the iguana was Ananda, and the Buddha himself had been Prince Paduma, later King Lotus.

What this story offered the wavering monk was not a judgment on every woman he might ever meet, but a measure of how far devotion built on appearance alone can be trusted against devotion proven through hardship. Paduma had already given his wife blood from his own body before she turned against him for a man he had saved from a river. The king's mercy toward her at the end showed that even the deepest betrayal did not require matching cruelty in return, only a clear naming of what had actually happened and a punishment that fit it.