Dasannaka Jataka

Jataka No. 401 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning a monk who, after joining the Order, found himself troubled by lingering longing for the wife he had left behind. To steady the monk's wavering heart, the Buddha recalled an old story of a king who had once suffered the same kind of grief, and the counselor whose wisdom had led him safely out of it.

In Benares there once reigned King Maddava, a ruler whose grief ran deeper than any of his courtiers knew. His chief queen had abandoned him, running off with a younger man, and the king sank into such despondency that he could find pleasure in nothing that was brought before him. His counselors searched for anything that might draw their sovereign's attention away from his sorrow, if only for an afternoon.

Among the king's counselors was Senaka, a learned Brahmin who would become the Bodhisatta, the Buddha himself in this past life, renowned for the kind of wisdom that could see past a spectacle to the deeper lesson hidden inside it. When a traveling performer arrived offering to swallow a sword before the court, Senaka recognized a chance in the display to lift the king's mind out of its grief. It was not the trick itself that mattered, but what the trick could be made to teach.

The performer produced a long, double-edged sword and, before the assembled nobles, tilted back his head and worked the blade slowly down his own throat until only the hilt remained between his teeth. The court gasped, and for a moment King Maddava's sorrow gave way to astonishment at a feat he had never imagined any mortal could survive, let alone perform for sport.

Watching the king's attention finally catch on something other than his grief, Senaka turned the moment into a teaching. He asked his two fellow counselors, Ayura and Pukkusa, whether anything in the world could truly be harder to do than swallowing a sword in front of a crowd. Each counselor, in turn, offered an answer that reached for a harder feat than the one before it.

Ayura spoke first, saying that merely promising a gift to another person, and meaning it sincerely, asked more of the heart than swallowing any blade. Pukkusa went further, insisting that actually carrying out a promised gift, parting with what one had pledged to give, was harder still than the promise alone. Senaka offered the hardest answer of the three. To have made a gift and given it away, and then to feel no regret afterward, no quiet wish to have kept it after all, was the most difficult feat of any described that day.

Hearing the three answers laid out in their rising order of difficulty, King Maddava understood at once what Senaka had truly been teaching him. His own sorrow was nothing other than regret for a gift of the heart he had already given and could not take back. The same discipline that let a person give without regret was the discipline he now needed to let his grief go without resentment.

Turning the riddle's lesson onto his own sorrow, King Maddava found that his longing for the departed queen eased in a way that mere distraction had never managed. He regained his self-composure not because the festival had entertained him, but because Senaka's teaching had shown him exactly where his own suffering had its root. It lay in a gift of the heart he had never learned to release without regret.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the grieving king with the monk who still longed for his former wife. He named Ayura as Moggallana and Pukkusa as Sariputta among his own disciples, declaring that he himself had been Senaka, the counselor whose riddle had once turned a king's grief into understanding. Hearing this, the troubled monk let go of his own unspoken regret, just as King Maddava had let go of his centuries before.