Gandatindu Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha spoke to the king of Kosala about what righteous rule actually required. He explained that when a king himself governs carelessly, his ministers follow his example downward, and the suffering spreads through the whole kingdom before he ever sees it directly. To make the point vivid, the Buddha told a story from a far older life.

In that former age, King Panchala ruled from Kampilla in the kingdom of the Northern Panchalas, living by evil ways and governing unrighteously, and his ministers followed him in it. Heavy taxes drove families to flee into the forest, and villages stood empty. Those who stayed fenced their houses with thorn branches and left at dawn, to be plundered by the king's men through the day and by robbers through the night.

Outside the city stood an ebony tree, home to a deity to whom the king gave an offering worth a thousand pieces of money every year. This deity was the Bodhisatta. Seeing the king's misrule and the ruin it brought, and knowing that no one else could speak to him, he resolved to admonish the king himself.

At night the deity entered the king's own chamber and hovered at the head of his bed, shining like the newly risen sun. He told the king that he was the divinity of the ebony tree and had come to give him good counsel. A careless king, he said, loses hold of his realm and is reborn in hell, and he makes his subjects careless too. In eleven verses he spoke of diligence and negligence, of decline, and of the fate of careless rulers, and he urged the king to listen closely to what people say and to go and look after his kingdom.

The next morning King Panchala handed the kingdom over to his ministers, and with his family priest, both in disguise, he left the city by the eastern gate. Their first meeting was with an old man, who was pierced by a thorn from his own fence as he came home at evening and cursed the king. When the priest said the king was not to blame, the old man answered that people suffered thieves by night and tax collectors by day under an evil king, and so fled to the forest and ringed their homes with thorns.

An old woman, a poor mother of two grown but unmarried daughters, fell from a bush while gathering leaves and wished the king dead so that her daughters might marry. A ploughman's ox was killed by the ploughshare while he waited for his meal, which the king's tax men had delayed, and he cursed the king.

A milkman kicked by a cow cursed him, and village boys whose calf the tax collectors had killed for a sword-sheath cursed him as well. Last, a frog in a dry tank, where crows were eating the frogs, cursed the king to be eaten in battle with his sons. The old man's curse and the frog's came about by the power of the Bodhisatta, who was drawing the king's attention to the truth.

The king and his priest concluded that every creature, even a frog in the forest, cursed them. They returned to the city, ruled the kingdom righteously, and gave themselves to generosity and other good deeds, following the counsel of the Great Being.

The Buddha closed the teaching for the king of Kosala by telling him that a king must abandon evil ways and rule righteously, and by revealing that he himself had been the deity of the ebony tree. Jataka No. 520 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

Nothing obliged the tree deity to intervene in the ruin of a kingdom. He could have simply kept receiving the king's yearly offering while the realm collapsed around his tree, and no rule of his own existence would have been broken. The story's quiet suggestion is that the one who is honored, even by a king who does not deserve it, may still answer with care for those who suffer under that king. The deity's eleven verses, in this light, were an act of compassion that no one had asked of him.

The deity had already told the king plainly what his carelessness was doing, and the king had apparently done nothing. What followed was a journey in which the king heard the curses of his own subjects without their knowing who he was. A warning can be set aside, but an old man cursing a king's name to a stranger's face, not knowing the stranger is the king, carries a weight no warning does. The king returned to rule righteously because he had heard the truth for himself and not merely been told it.