Dubhiya-makkata Jataka

At Veluvana, the Bamboo Grove monastery near Rajagaha, the monks had gathered to discuss Devadatta's failure to repay the kindness shown to him and his repeated disloyalty toward those who had been his friends. The Buddha, overhearing their talk, told them that this was nothing new in Devadatta: the very same ingratitude had marked his conduct in a distant birth as well, long before either of them had taken up the robe. To prove it, he told the story that follows.

In the kingdom of Kasi, during the reign of King Brahmadatta, a deep well without any direct way down to the water stood beside a well-traveled highway. Pious wayfarers who passed that way would draw water up by rope and bucket and pour it into a trough set beside the well, so that the animals of other travelers, and indeed any thirsty creature of the forest, might drink freely as an act of merit. The Bodhisatta, born in that life as a brahmin, was one such traveler, and the monkeys that lived in the surrounding woods had long grown used to finding water there.

For some time no one had passed that way to draw water, and the trough stood dry under the sun. The forest monkeys, denied their usual drink, grew thirsty and miserable, wandering restlessly near the well with no way to reach the water far below its mouth. It was in this state that the Bodhisatta found them when he next came down the road.

Seeing the animals' distress, the brahmin drew up water from the well with his rope and bucket exactly as the custom required, and filled the trough so that a thirsty monkey among them could come down and drink. The monkey did so gladly, lapping up the water until its thirst was satisfied, with nothing yet to suggest the ingratitude that was about to follow.

No sooner had the monkey finished drinking than it turned on its benefactor, baring its teeth and twisting its face into a mocking, threatening grimace, the sort of display monkeys make when they mean mischief or contempt rather than thanks. The brahmin, who had drawn the water at some trouble to himself purely so that the thirsty creature might live, found this response bewildering and plainly hurtful.

He did not answer with anger. Instead he spoke to the monkey directly, saying in effect that when it had been thirsty and wretched he had given it water freely, and that this grimacing was the only thanks he now received for it. He reflected quietly that kindness spent on such a creature seemed to be labor given in vain, yet he still did not regret having given the water in the first place.

The monkey, far from being shamed by this gentle rebuke, announced its intention to do the brahmin one further discourtesy before making its escape. Such, the story says, was simply its manner: a creature of that nature needed no grievance or provocation to turn on a benefactor, since rudeness and ingratitude were not reactions for it but habits.

Climbing swiftly up to a branch directly above where the brahmin stood, the monkey fouled his head from its perch and then fled at once into the depths of the forest, leaving the man who had drawn its water standing soiled and alone beside the trough he had just filled for its sake.

The telling preserves two short verses from this encounter: one condemning the particular ingratitude of a creature that repays water with insult, and a second observing that such rude and threatening behavior is simply the monkey's own nature, requiring no deeper cause than the kind of animal it is. Together the verses turn a small roadside incident into a settled teaching on the character of the ungrateful.

Concluding the tale at Veluvana, the Buddha revealed that the ungrateful monkey of that birth was Devadatta himself, and that the brahmin who had drawn the water and borne the insult without anger was the Buddha in a life long before his final awakening. The monks who had been discussing Devadatta's disloyalty that very day now had, in a single old story, a long history of the same failing stretching back across many lives.

The Dubhiya-makkata Jataka, No. 174 in the Pali canon, is remembered less for any dramatic rescue than for its plain, almost everyday picture of ingratitude: a thirsty creature given water freely, who answers the gift with a threatening face and a deliberate insult before running off. Buddhist commentary has long read the brahmin's calm, unembittered response as the heart of the story's teaching, for he neither struck the monkey nor swore off future kindness because of it. Good done for the sake of goodness does not depend on the character of the one who receives it, and a single act of ingratitude, however stinging, says everything about the creature who commits it and nothing at all about the worth of the kindness that was shown.