Ekapanna Jataka

The Ekapanna Jataka, recorded in the first volume of the Pali Canon's Jataka commentary, was told by the Buddha concerning a prince of the Licchavi clan (a ruling people of Vesali) named Duttha, whose temperament had earned him a reputation as troubling as his name. This contemporary prince had himself been the wayward Dutthakumara of the old tale, and the Buddha used the shared name and fierce temper to recall the lesson the ancient tale had already taught once before.

In that old story, a brahmin ascetic of great spiritual power, who would become the Bodhisatta, dwelt in the Himalaya before one day descending to the city of Benares. His bearing and discipline so impressed the king of Benares that the king invited him to remain in the royal park through the coming rainy season, honoring him as a guest whose wisdom the court itself might draw upon.

The king of Benares carried a private sorrow that no amount of royal comfort could ease. His own son, also named Dutthakumara, was so ill-natured, violent, and ungovernable that neither royal tutors nor the king's own authority had ever managed to reform him. Having tried every ordinary remedy without success, the king turned to the ascetic as a last resort, placing the prince directly in his care for the duration of the rainy season.

One day, walking together through the hermitage grounds, the ascetic noticed a nimba seedling that had only just broken through the soil, bearing nothing yet but a single young leaf. Without explaining his purpose, he asked the prince to pluck that one leaf and taste it for himself, offering no hint of the lesson the bitter little plant was about to teach.

The prince placed the leaf on his tongue and spat it out at once, overwhelmed by a bitterness far stronger than anything so small a leaf should have carried. Furious at the taste, he tore the seedling out by its roots and ground it underfoot. He declared that so poisonous a plant deserved to be destroyed before it ever had the chance to grow into a tree capable of killing anyone who came near it.

The ascetic let the prince's own fury settle before speaking. He asked the prince to consider what he had just done, destroying a seedling for the bitterness it already carried in its very first leaf, and then to turn that same judgment on himself. If the prince was already this harsh, this violent, and this impossible to endure while still young, the ascetic asked, what kind of ruler would that same bitterness produce once it had grown to fill an entire kingdom.

The ascetic pressed the comparison further, telling the prince that a people cannot be expected to love what wounds them any more than a traveler could love a nimba tree grown tall and poisonous. Just as the prince had uprooted the bitter seedling the moment he recognized what it would become, his own subjects would one day rise against a ruler whose cruelty had been given the chance to mature unchecked. They would show him no more patience than he had shown the seedling beneath his heel.

The lesson reached the prince in a way no scolding from his own tutors ever had, precisely because he had delivered the judgment against the seedling with his own hand before the ascetic turned it back upon him. Humbled, the prince set aside the fury that had ruled him since childhood and returned to his father's court resolved to govern, when his own time came, with the patience he had refused the bitter little plant.

Royal tutors had tried for years to curb the prince's temper through warning and rebuke, and every attempt had failed because the prince could always dismiss a scolding as someone else's judgment of him, delivered by people whose authority he resented. The nimba leaf succeeded where they had not because the prince condemned the seedling entirely on his own terms, with his own hand and his own words, before the ascetic ever spoke a single word of comparison. He could not dismiss a verdict he had already passed himself.

When the Buddha recalled this old story for the contemporary Licchavi prince who shared Duttha's name and Duttha's temper, he revealed that the two were one and the same person: the present-day prince was this very Dutthakumara reborn, carrying forward the same fierce temperament the ascetic had once tamed. The Buddha identified the king of Benares from the old tale with Ananda, and named himself as the brahmin ascetic who had guided the young prince back from cruelty. A fault recognized and uprooted while still small, the Buddha taught, spares both the one who carries it and everyone who would otherwise have to live beneath the tree it eventually became.