Kandari Jataka

The Kandari Jataka, No. 341 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, is not told as a complete tale on its own. Its ancient listing says only that the full account is given elsewhere, inside the great Kunala Jataka, No. 536, one of the longest birth-stories in the whole collection. To understand what happened to King Kandari, the story must be read as a small episode set within that much bigger teaching.

In the Kunala Jataka, the Bodhisatta appears as Kunala, a wise bird-king living in the Himalayas. Kunala speaks to Punnamukha, a royal cuckoo, offering a long series of old tales about the instability of the human heart when it is seized by desire. The Kandari story is one tale among many that Kunala recounts, told not to condemn anyone but to illustrate how deeply the craving for pleasure can mislead even those who seem most content.

Among the old tales Kunala tells is the story of King Kandari of Benares, a ruler so handsome that his counsellors brought him a thousand boxes of perfume each day to scent the palace. His queen, Kinnara, was celebrated for her beauty, and his family chaplain, Pancalacanda, was the king's own age and very wise. A rose-apple (jambu) tree grew against the palace wall, its branches hanging over it, and in its shade lived a man who was disfigured and disabled.

Queen Kinnara caught sight of this man from her window and, against all reason, became infatuated with him. Once the king had fallen asleep, she slipped out with rich food, let herself down by a cloth rope, climbed the tree and spent time with the man. She then returned the same way, perfumed herself and lay down beside the king, who knew nothing of it.

The story does not linger on the details of these visits. What it preserves is the simple, unsettling fact that a queen who wanted for nothing in the palace could not let go of an attachment that offered her nothing but secrecy and risk. Kunala tells it as one example among several of how craving chooses its object without regard for status, comfort, or common sense.

Returning one day from a procession, the king noticed the man beneath the tree and remarked to his chaplain that no woman with desire would ever approach such a creature. The man, feeling proud and assuming the king knew nothing, begged the spirit of the tree to keep his secret. The chaplain took this as a sign that the queen was using the tree to reach her lover and told the king so. The king doubted it, but agreed to put it to the test.

That night King Kandari pretended to be asleep, and the queen went out as usual. He followed her and waited beneath the tree. The disfigured man scolded her for being late and struck the chain of her ear-ornament, and an earring shaped like a lion's head fell to the ground at the king's feet. The king picked it up and kept it.

The next day the king ordered the queen to appear wearing all the ornaments he had given her. She came with only one earring and said the lion's-head earring was with the goldsmith. When the king questioned the goldsmith, the man said he did not have it. Enraged, the king threw the earring at her and told the chaplain to have her put to death.

The chaplain did not carry out the order. He had the queen confined in a part of the palace and proposed a journey to show the king how common such frailty was. The king handed his kingdom to his mother and set out in disguise with the chaplain. Beside the road they met a wedding party, and by a contrived scene the chaplain let the king see a young woman of that party break faith as readily as the queen had. The two travelled on across Jambudipa, seeing further examples, and the chaplain concluded that Kinnara's lapse was not unique to her. They returned to Benares.

On his return the chaplain asked the king to forgive Kinnara. The king pardoned her but had her expelled from the palace. He took another queen, drove the disfigured man away, and ordered the overhanging branch of the rose-apple tree cut down so that it could never again serve as a bridge between the palace and the world outside it.

Because the Kandari episode survives as a story recounted within the Kunala Jataka, the identification is brief. In the Kandari account the wise chaplain Pancalacanda was the Bodhisatta, and in the larger Kunala frame he is Kunala. The lesson drawn from Kandari's grief was one strand within a much wider teaching on how attachment distorts judgment in anyone it touches, ruler or commoner alike.

Long after King Kandari's household had been quietly set back in order, the story of the rose-apple tree continued to be retold as a caution against assuming that comfort, beauty, or royal favor can ever secure anyone against the pull of misplaced desire. By folding this small, painful episode into Kunala's long address to Punnamukha, the Jataka collection preserves it not as gossip about one unhappy household, but as a patient reminder that the mind's cravings must be examined honestly, however uncomfortable that examination turns out to be.