Kalaya-Mutthi Jataka

Jataka No. 176 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha to King Pasenadi of Kosala. Pasenadi was setting out during the rains to put down a border rebellion, and stopped at Jetavana to visit the Buddha on his way. To show the king what such an expedition could cost him in proportion to what it might gain, the Buddha recalled an old story of another king who had once marched out on nearly the same errand.

In that former life, King Brahmadatta of Benares learned that a revolt had broken out on his frontier. Though it was the rainy season, he set out with his army, foot soldiers, cavalry, chariots, and war elephants together, resolved to march to the border and put the rebellion down.

At midday the great column halted in a shaded park to rest the horses. The king sat with his counselor, the Bodhisatta, beneath a spreading banyan tree, while attendants poured roasted peas into stone troughs to feed the royal chargers.

Drawn by the smell of the roasted peas, a monkey swung down from the branches and snatched a full fistful from one of the troughs. He scrambled back up into the tree to eat his prize at leisure, perched comfortably on a fork in the boughs above the resting army.

As the monkey ate, a single pea slipped from his closed fist and fell into the thicket below. Rather than simply continuing to enjoy the dozens of peas still safely in his grip, he was seized with such distress over the one he had lost that he dropped the entire handful to go searching for it.

Scrambling down through the thorns, the monkey pawed through the undergrowth looking for the single fallen pea. While he searched, the sparrows and pigeons of the park descended on the whole handful he had abandoned above and ate every last one of them before he ever returned. He climbed back to his branch with nothing at all, not even the single pea he had gone to such trouble to recover.

The Bodhisatta spoke two verses. The first called the monkey a fool who had thrown away a whole fistful of peas to search for the one that fell. The second turned the lesson on the king: greedy people lose a great deal by chasing a little, and an army marched out at the wrong season would lose far more in elephants, horses, carts, and men than it could possibly gain, so it was unwise to go now.

Struck by the force of the comparison, King Brahmadatta recognized that he was about to do exactly what the monkey had done. He was risking everything secure in his hand for the sake of recovering something small and already lost. He turned his army back and returned straight to Benares. When the rebels heard that the king was coming to crush them, they fled the border, and everything the campaign would have put at risk stayed intact.

Had the Bodhisatta simply told King Brahmadatta that his campaign was unwise, pride alone might have hardened the king's resolve rather than softening it, since a sovereign rarely enjoys being told outright that his judgment has failed him. By letting the king watch the monkey's own folly play out to its conclusion before drawing the comparison, the Bodhisatta let Brahmadatta reach the uncomfortable recognition himself, which is precisely why the lesson reached him at all.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified King Brahmadatta with Ananda, and let King Pasenadi draw the same lesson for his own expedition that Brahmadatta had once drawn from a monkey's wasted handful of peas. Hearing the comparison laid out so plainly, Pasenadi abandoned his own campaign and returned to his capital, choosing, as Brahmadatta had, to keep what he already held rather than risk it all chasing something small.