Gandhara Jataka

Jataka No. 406 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha to explain why the monastic Order limits how long a monk may keep medicine in store, a rule meant to prevent even small, reasonable-seeming provisions from quietly becoming attachments. To show how easily such small hoarding takes root, even in a mind that has already renounced everything else, the Buddha recalled an old story. It told of two kings who had each given up an empire and still found greed waiting for them in a single pinch of salt.

In that former life the Bodhisatta ruled Gandhara from Takshashila, while in neighboring Videha a like-minded king governed Mithila with equal virtue. The two sovereigns had never once stood in each other's presence. Yet through the merchants who traveled between their kingdoms, they had built a friendship on reputation and shared ideals alone, each knowing the other only by the virtue reported of him.

Watching a lunar eclipse darken the sky one night, the king of Gandhara was struck by how completely even the brightest light could be swallowed and hidden in a single moment. He recognized in that darkening moon the same fate waiting for every grandeur he still called his own. He handed his kingdom to his ministers, took up the bark garments of a forest ascetic, and withdrew alone into the Himalayas.

When the king of Videha learned that his friend had abandoned Takshashila for a hermit's life, he found he could no longer justify remaining on his own throne a single day longer. He questioned why he should stay entangled in the very cares his friend had already judged not worth keeping. He placed his own crown on his son's head and went in search of the same wilderness his friend had chosen.

The two men, each now stripped of every mark of royalty, found each other beside a mountain pool deep in the Himalaya, recognizing in each other's bearing the same nobility that had once distinguished them at their separate courts. They built adjoining leaf huts, and from that day shared a hermit's life together, living on wild fruit and the plain leaves the forest provided.

On an alms round to a village at the edge of the wilderness, a devotee gave the king of Videha a small quantity of salt to season his otherwise tasteless forest greens. Rather than using all of it at once, Videha set a portion aside, reasoning privately that the alms round might yield nothing on some future day and the saved salt would season that leaner meal when it came.

That evening the Bodhisatta noticed the small bundle Videha had carefully tied into the fold of his robe and asked what it held. When Videha explained that he was keeping it against a hungrier day, the Bodhisatta answered him plainly, without softening the truth. A man who had walked away from sixteen thousand cities and a treasury beyond counting without a backward glance had now begun, in this one small fold of cloth, to practice the very grasping he had renounced an empire to escape.

Videha did not take the rebuke well. Stung, he answered back: the Bodhisatta had once said he would admonish only himself, so why was he now correcting another? Speaking sharply to a man, even when the words are true, felt to him like being shaved with a blunt blade. The Bodhisatta did not retreat. He said that he spoke out of righteousness because he disliked unrighteousness, that the listener might take offence or not, and that he would keep speaking truth, correcting his friend again and again rather than handling him like a potter who works only soft, raw clay, because truth endures.

Then he spoke of how people are like vessels, some trained in wisdom and good conduct, others untrained and wandering like a blinded buffalo. Hearing this, Videha's anger gave way. He asked to be admonished from then on and begged pardon for his hot words, and the Bodhisatta forgave him. No renunciation can be called complete while any part of it is still being quietly kept back for tomorrow, and the two friends returned together to the Himalayas, where the Bodhisatta gave him a meditation subject and both attained the Absorptions and Super Knowledges.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the ascetic king of Videha with his own disciple Ananda. He let his listeners understand that he himself had been the king of Gandhara, whose single question had exposed how a pinch of salt could still carry the whole weight of an abandoned kingdom. It was this old story, he explained, that stood behind the Order's own rule limiting how long a monk might keep medicine in reserve. No follower of his, he meant, should mistake small, reasonable-seeming provision for the harmless thing it only appeared to be.