Jayaddisa Jataka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana, after learning that a certain monk was quietly using part of his almsfood to support his aged mother. It is recorded as Jataka No. 513 in the Jatakatthavannana of the Pali Canon. Asked whether sages of old had ever given up royal splendor for the sake of a parent, the Buddha answered that they had. He then told this tale of the kingdom of Pancala.

In the generation before King Jayaddisa, his father ruled Pancala from the city of Kampilla with two queens. The lesser queen was consumed by jealousy toward the chief queen's sons, and in her resentment she made a bitter vow. Upon her death she was reborn as a flesh-eating ogress, still bound by the hatred she had carried from her human life.

In her fury, the ogress stole and devoured the queen's infant sons. When she carried off one more child, something of her old human heart stirred. Instead of harming him, she took him to a cemetery cave and raised him as her own, giving him a root to hide his ogrish form.

The child grew to manhood not knowing he had been born a prince; he believed the cemetery and the ogress were his only world. In time he cast aside the root that had hidden his true form. Wild and fearsome from his upbringing, he became a man-eating ogre who preyed on travelers in the forest.

Years later, King Jayaddisa, the ogre's younger brother, born after the ogress had died, went hunting and strayed beneath a great banyan tree. There, this same ogre seized him and declared his intention to kill and eat him. Jayaddisa did not plead merely out of fear of death. He remembered that he had promised payment to a poor brahmin named Nanda, for verses the brahmin had recited to him that very morning, and he could not bear to die with that debt of honor unpaid.

"A promise once I to a brahmin made; that promise still is due, that debt unpaid," Jayaddisa told his captor. He asked leave to return to Kampilla and discharge the debt before coming back to be devoured. Moved by the king's devotion to truth, the ogre let him go, trusting he would keep his word.

Jayaddisa returned to the city and paid Nanda in full. Then, weeping, he told his sixteen-year-old son, Prince Alinasattu — the Bodhisatta — of the vow that now bound him to return to the banyan tree and die. Rather than let his father break a king's word or face the ogre again, Alinasattu insisted on going in his place.

When the prince presented himself calmly beneath the banyan tree, the ogre expected terror. Instead, he told Alinasattu to go and gather sticks to build a funeral pyre, thinking this grim errand would break his composure. Alinasattu obeyed without a trace of fear and returned with the wood, prepared to die.

Struck by the prince's fearless virtue, the ogre declared that one so truthful, kindly, and just could surely never be eaten. He let him go unharmed. As they spoke further, Alinasattu came to suspect who his captor truly was, noticing that his red eyes never blinked and that he cast no shadow. He took him to an ascetic of supernatural sight, who revealed the truth: this was his own father's elder brother, carried off in infancy by the vengeful ogress. Spared by a flicker of her old human love, he had grown up among the dead to become the very ogre before him.

Alinasattu's uncle, once the ogre, was shown by the ascetic the truth of his royal birth and guided toward renunciation. The former man-eater renounced his violence, was ordained, and spent the rest of his days in the peace he had never known since childhood.

The Buddha closed the tale by naming who each figure had been. The ascetic who received the reformed ogre was Sariputta in that life. The ogre himself, once a feared devourer of travelers, was Angulimala, who in the Buddha's own time had likewise turned from violence to the holy life. Uppalavanna, who in the Buddha's own time became a foremost Buddhist nun, had been the prince's younger sister, and the mother of Rahula had been his queen consort. And Prince Alinasattu, who had walked fearlessly toward death to spare his father's honor, was the Buddha himself in a former birth.

The Jayaddisa Jataka endures because it ties truthfulness, filial devotion, and fearlessness into a single act: a prince who would rather die than see his father's word broken. His composure before death becomes the very thing that saves both father and long-lost kinsman. The Buddha said the monk at Jetavana, who quietly fed his mother from his own almsfood, stood in that same old lineage of children who count no sacrifice too great for a parent's sake. The story closes by returning attention to that same unglamorous duty, rather than to the drama of the banyan tree.