Kalinga-Bodhi Jataka

This tale, recorded as Jataka No. 479 in the Jatakatthavannana of the Pali Canon, was told by the Buddha at Jetavana after Elder Ananda raised a question about honoring him properly. While the Buddha was away on a long pilgrimage, the people of Savatthi had come to Jetavana with garlands, wanting to pay reverence, but found no fitting place to leave them. Ananda asked the Buddha whether a shrine could be set up even while he still lived, since body-relics are normally venerated only after a Buddha's death.

The Buddha answered that the great Bodhi Tree, under which every Buddha attains enlightenment, is fit to be venerated as a shrine whether a Buddha is living or dead, unlike relics of the body. With this teaching, Ananda planted a seed of the Bodhi Tree at the gateway of Jetavana, and it grew by a wonder into a great tree fifty cubits high with five mighty branches, later known as the Ananda Bodhi. To show why the tree deserved such honor, the Buddha then told this older story.

In the kingdom of Kalinga, King Kalinga had two sons. Seers foretold that the elder would inherit the throne, while the younger, though he would live as a forest ascetic, was destined to father a universal monarch. When the elder brother grew suspicious of the younger's bearing, the younger prince fled to the forest to live apart.

Elsewhere, the daughter of the King of Madda had received an identical prophecy, and her family, fearing the ambitions of rival kings, fled upriver into the same forest. She let a wreath of flowers drift down the Ganges, and the exiled prince, finding it downstream, searched until he found her. The two were married in the forest.

Their son, also named Kalinga, inherited tokens of royal succession, a signet ring, a rug, and a sword, which let him claim his uncle's throne in the city of Dantapura. In time he became a universal monarch in his own right, and the five treasures that mark such a sovereign's rule appeared to confirm it.

Traveling in great state to visit his parents, King Kalinga approached the sacred precinct of the Bodhi Tree, and his elephant stopped short, refusing to go any farther into that hallowed ground. His chaplain, Kalinga-Bharadvaja, the Bodhisatta in that life, explained that this was the place where every Buddha crushes all desire of the flesh, and that no one, whatever his rank, could force a passage through it.

Unwilling to accept this, the king drove his goad into the animal again, forcing it onward until the elephant, pierced and in pain, sank down and died beneath him. By the king's own merit and the power attending such a sovereign, another elephant of the sacred Uposatha breed (a breed of elephant fit to carry a king) appeared at once and offered its back, and the king mounted it and continued toward the tree.

Humbled by what he had seen, King Kalinga commanded that fragrant flowers be gathered from across his realm, and for seven days held a great festival of worship at the Bodhi Tree's circuit, bringing offerings of flowers in sixty thousand carts to honor the place where every Buddha's victory over Mara had been won.

The Buddha closed the story by revealing that King Kalinga had been Ananda in that former birth, and that the wise chaplain, Kalinga-Bharadvaja, who had explained the sanctity of the Bodhi Tree, had been the Buddha himself.

The Kalinga-Bodhi Jataka endures because it answers Ananda's very question from within the story itself: the Bodhi Tree is worthy of worship not because of any relic enshrined within it, but because of what was accomplished beneath its branches, a worthiness that holds true whether the Buddha who attained it there is living or has passed away. The grief of the dead elephant, and the mercy of the new one that appeared, remind every reader that even power and lineage must yield before ground made sacred by awakening, and that reverence offered there, as Ananda offered it at Jetavana, is never wasted devotion.