Haritamata Jataka

Jataka No. 239 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning King Ajatasattu, whose moods swung wildly between delight and despair over his long rivalry with his uncle, the king of Kosala, in the years after Ajatasattu had seized his father's throne for himself. To show that such wild swings between triumph and defeat were nothing new in the world, the Buddha recalled an old river-tale of a snake who learned the same lesson at far greater cost than a change of mood.

Along a river where fishermen regularly set wicker cages to catch their catch, a water snake noticed the fish gathering inside one of the traps. It slipped through the funnel-shaped opening after them, intending an easy meal from creatures that could not easily escape the cage's tight weave.

Once inside, the snake discovered that the fish were not as helpless as their confinement suggested. Crowded together with nowhere to flee, the fish turned on the very predator that had come to devour them. They bit at its body again and again until the snake, covered in blood, found no other way out and slipped back through the mouth of the trap, then lay in pain at the water's edge.

At that moment a green frog, who would become the Bodhisatta, leapt into the mouth of the same trap. The snake, with no one else to turn to, called to the frog and asked whether he approved of what the fish had done to him: though a venomous snake, he said, he had entered the trap, and the frog seemed pleased to see the little fish biting him.

The frog answered that yes, he was pleased, and why should he not be? If the snake ate fish in their waters, the fish would eat him when he entered theirs. No creature is weak in its own place, its own district, its own feeding ground. In a verse he added that a man will plunder for as long as it profits him, but when others begin to plunder him, the plunderer becomes the one plundered.

The Bodhisatta-frog said no more and watched. The fish, seeing the snake's weakness, cried out, "Let us seize our foe!" and came out of the trap. They killed the snake on the spot and went away. The snake received no sympathy and no rescue; the harm he had done to others came back to him in the very place where he had thought himself the hunter. The frog's two replies, one in plain speech and one in verse, make the same point from two sides: strength belongs to a place and a moment, and the one who plunders freely has no claim to be spared when the tables turn.

The Buddha told this tale at the Bamboo Grove about King Ajatasattu. After killing his father Bimbisara, Ajatasattu fought a back-and-forth war with his uncle, the king of Kosala, over a village in Kasi that had been his mother's support. When he won, he paraded home in triumph; when he lost, he crept home in secret. The monks spoke of this in the Dhamma Hall, and the Buddha told them that Ajatasattu had always been elated in victory and wretched in defeat, in earlier lives as well as in this one. He then told them the tale of the trap, so that they could see the pattern for themselves and not only the passing mood of one king. His elation in victory and misery in defeat were two faces of one mistake, assuming that the advantage of the moment will hold, and the snake's fate in the trap showed where such a mistake can end.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the water snake with King Ajatasattu and the green frog with himself. The lesson the frog gave at the trap's mouth, that the plunderer is plundered in his turn, applied as surely to a king's fortunes in war as to a snake who mistook a crowded trap for an easy meal.