Kakkaru Jataka

At Jetavana, after Devadatta caused a schism in the Buddha's own community and departed with the disciples he had drawn to his side, blood is said to have burst suddenly from his mouth as the assembly broke apart. The Buddha told his monks that this was not the first time dishonesty had cost this man dearly; the very same pattern, and the very same pain, had struck him once before, in a far older life.

In that former age, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a great festival filled the city with music, banners, and crowds along the riverbanks. The Bodhisatta was living at that time as one of the gods of Tavatimsa heaven, home to the Thirty-Three gods. Four of these gods, the Bodhisatta the chief among them, descended to watch the celebration, wearing wreaths of heavenly kakkaru flowers whose fragrance spread through every street and courtyard of the city below.

Captivated by the scent filling the air, King Brahmadatta looked up to see the four radiant gods above his city and asked where such a fragrance could have come from.

The gods answered that these wreaths of kakkaru flowers belonged only to people of real virtue, and were not meant for the base, the foolish, or the sinful. To show what they meant, each of the four recited a verse naming the qualities that suit the wreath: refraining from theft and from lying; earning wealth honestly and avoiding excess; holding to a steady purpose and faith while eating simply; and never speaking ill of good people while doing as one says.

The king's own chaplain, a brahmin who had none of these qualities, was eager for the honor of wearing a god's garland. Hoping the people would think him virtuous, he claimed each virtue in turn, and so, one deva after another, he lied four times and received all four wreaths.

Once he held all four wreaths, the chaplain was seized by a terrible headache, as though a spike were being driven through his head, and the wreaths were fixed so tightly to him that no one could remove them. The court could do nothing for him. The fragrance that had drawn the whole city to look up now marked the one man who had worn it unworthily, and the festival crowds who had admired the gods' flowers watched the chaplain's suffering instead. What he had sought as an honor before the people had become a burden he could not set down.

After seven days of torment, the king arranged another festival. The gods returned, and the chaplain lay prostrate before them and begged for mercy. They rebuked him for his deceit, then removed the wreaths and departed.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming the chaplain as Devadatta, and the three gods who had accompanied the Bodhisatta that day as Kassapa, Moggallana, and Sariputta, with the Buddha himself as the chief among the four. Jataka No. 326 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

What stands out in this story is that the gods' words alone kept the honest at a distance: nothing in the account suggests the chaplain was pressed to step forward. He chose to claim virtues he knew he did not hold, and he did so not once but four times, once for each deva. The story treats his suffering less as misfortune than as the predictable result of a vain, dishonest nature hoping that a spoken claim could stand in for the quality itself.

The chaplain had every opportunity to speak truthfully before reaching for the wreaths, and chose instead to repeat his falsehood to each deva in turn. Only after seven days of agony did he lie prostrate and beg for mercy. The story's quiet implication is that a claim to virtue is tested less by whether others believe it than by what it costs the one who made it.