Dummedha Jataka

Jataka No. 50 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha at Jetavana monastery concerning actions undertaken for the benefit of the whole world, the kind of skillful intervention that accomplishes real good without requiring any actual harm to be done. To illustrate what such action looks like, the Buddha recalled an old story of a prince of Benares who ended a kingdom's cruelty through nothing more than a carefully chosen proclamation.

When Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, his subjects observed their religious festivals by slaughtering goats, sheep, pigs, and fowl in great numbers, offering the blood and flesh to the gods they believed governed their fortune. Prince Brahmadatta, who would become the Bodhisatta, watched this destruction of life year after year and was sickened by it, yet he understood that commanding his father's subjects to stop outright would only drive their rites into hiding rather than ending them.

Resolving that he would find a way to end the slaughter once the kingdom passed to him, the young prince began visiting a great banyan tree on the edge of the city, home to a deity the people already revered. He brought offerings and paid visible reverence at the tree. Before witnesses, he vowed that if he succeeded his father to the throne, he would himself hold a grand sacrifice in the deity's honor, offering up all those in his kingdom who broke the five precepts of moral conduct.

When his father died and the prince was crowned, he did not forget the vow he had made at the banyan tree. He summoned his ministers, priests, and the citizens of Benares to hear his first proclamation as their new king. He declared that he had vowed to sacrifice every person in the realm who killed a living being, stole another's property, committed sexual misconduct, spoke falsehood, or drank intoxicating liquor. His officers, he said, stood ready to seize any such offender for the altar.

The proclamation spread through Benares faster than any decree of punishment ever had. From that day forward, no citizen dared touch liquor, steal so much as a coin, or lift a hand against any living creature, for fear of being named among the thousand the new king had vowed to offer up. The slaughterhouses that had once run red during festival season fell silent, and the religious sacrifices that had cost so many animal lives each year simply stopped being held at all.

Though the king had vowed to sacrifice a thousand wrongdoers, not a single person in his kingdom ever broke the five precepts seriously enough to be seized for the altar he had promised. The vow had sounded, on the day it was announced, like the cruelest threat any king had ever made to his own people. It turned out instead to be the very thing that spared every animal and every person in the realm from the fate it described.

Had the young king simply forbidden sacrifice outright on the day of his coronation, his subjects would have faced a decree asking them to abandon rites they still believed necessary for their own safety and prosperity. Fear of the gods they thought they were honoring would have driven many of them to continue in secret rather than risk divine displeasure. By instead threatening the wrongdoers themselves with a fate connected to the very altar they feared offending, the king turned the people's own religious anxiety against the practice that had been causing the harm. Abandoning the sacrifices came to feel like obedience to the gods rather than defiance of them.

The years the prince spent visiting the banyan tree before he ever held any power to command anyone mattered as much as the proclamation itself. They gave him time to watch exactly how his father's subjects thought and feared, before he tried to redirect that fear toward something merciful. A less patient ruler might have issued the same prohibition the moment he inherited the throne, and then been forced to enforce it through punishment after punishment as citizens quietly defied him. The Bodhisatta's years of quiet observation let him reach instead for the one proclamation that would work without a single person ever needing to be punished at all.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified himself with the wise king of Benares, and identified his own disciples gathered at Jetavana with the ministers who had once stood beside that throne and watched a single proclamation accomplish, through fear alone, what no amount of ordinary preaching against sacrifice had ever managed to achieve.