Gijjha Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha spoke about a monk of noble birth who refused every word of guidance from his elders and teachers, insisting that he alone knew what was good for him. To show where such obstinacy leads, the Buddha recalled an old life, preserved in the Pali Canon as Jataka No. 427, the Gijjha Jataka.

In that distant age, the Bodhisatta was born as a vulture dwelling on Gijjhakuta, the Mountain of Vultures, together with his mate. Their son, Supatta, grew into a vulture of extraordinary strength, who in time became king over many thousands of vultures. Despite his power and his great following, Supatta never neglected his aging parents, flying out daily to bring them food.

Knowing the dangers that lay far above the ordinary paths that vultures flew, the father called his son to him and set a clear limit on how far he should ever travel from the nest. He told Supatta that he might soar as high and as far as he wished, provided that he could still see the earth's rounded horizon ringed by its encircling ocean below him. The moment that horizon vanished from view, he was to turn back at once, without exception, and never press further into the sky beyond it.

Supatta heard his father's words and agreed to them without protest. For a long while he kept faithfully within the boundary he had been given, ranging widely across the sky but always careful to keep the far rim of the world in sight, just as his father had instructed.

In time, the rainy season arrived, bringing with it banks of heavy, swirling clouds that gathered thickly over Gijjhakuta and the surrounding country. Thick weather of this kind made the sky difficult to judge, and the usual markers by which a bird could gauge its distance from home grew harder to see through the haze and rolling vapor.

During one of these clouded, blustery days, Supatta set out together with a great number of his fellow vultures, rising higher and higher into the turbulent sky as they followed the hunting birds do in search of food carried on the wind. Caught up in the chase and in the thrill of flying among so many of his kind, Supatta pressed upward and outward without noticing how far the obscured horizon had already slipped from view.

Lost in the grey, swirling cloud, Supatta flew on well beyond the limit his father had set, no longer able to see the distant rim of ocean that had always told him when to turn for home. He had crossed, without quite realizing it, into the outer reaches of the sky where the ordinary winds give way to something far more violent.

High above the clouds where Supatta had wandered blows the Veramba, a wind of such tremendous and destructive force that nothing caught within it can hope to survive unharmed. The moment Supatta's flight carried him into its grip, the wind seized him entirely, tossing his great and powerful body as though it were no more substantial than a dry leaf.

For all his strength and all his standing as king over thousands of vultures, Supatta was utterly powerless against the Veramba. The wind tore him apart in the space of a few moments, scattering what had once been the mightiest bird on the mountain until nothing of him remained to be found. His death came suddenly, far from his parents' cave, in exactly the place his father had warned him never to enter.

When word of his son's death reached the old vulture on Gijjhakuta, he grieved for the proud and powerful child he had raised and warned, knowing that every word of his caution had been sound and that only Supatta's drift past an unseen boundary, rather than any failure of strength, had cost him his life.

At the close of the story, the Buddha identified the two vultures for his listeners. The disobedient young vulture who flew to his death stood for the headstrong monk who refused all instruction, and the grieving father who had set the boundary and watched it broken was the Bodhisatta, the Buddha himself, in that distant former life.

Jataka No. 427 does not measure its lesson in strength or rank, both of which Supatta possessed in abundance, but in the willingness to keep a boundary once it is understood to be wise. The Buddha used this old grief to tell the proud monk, and every reader since, that the counsel of elders exists to mark exactly where visible ground gives way to a danger too great for any strength to survive, and that true wisdom lies in turning back before that boundary is lost from sight.