Kandina Jataka

The Buddha told the Kandina Jataka, No. 13 of the Ekanipata (a section of the Jataka collection) in the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana for the benefit of a newly ordained monk. This monk had grown restless in his practice, tormented by longing for the wife he had left behind when he entered the order. When his brother monks brought him before the Buddha, the Buddha told him that this very attachment had once cost him his life, and then told the story of the stag to show why.

In those days, while a king reigned in Rajagaha (capital of the kingdom of Magadha), the deer of the region faced grave danger whenever the crops had grown, and so they withdrew into the forest until the danger had passed. Among them was a stag who lived in the mountains.

The mountain stag fell in love with a doe who lived near a village, and was overcome at once by desire for her. From that moment he could think of nothing else. When the deer came down from the hills again, he insisted on going with her, though she warned him that the country around the village was dangerous, and he was deaf to her warning.

The doe knew the dangers of the village better than the besotted stag. Yet he would not turn back, and the two came down toward the road where hunters lay in ambush. As they drew near, the doe caught the scent of a man close by. She said nothing of it, but lagged behind and let the stag walk ahead of her.

The stag, his attention fixed entirely on her and nothing else, walked on without a thought for what might be waiting. A hunter who lay hidden beside the road loosed a single arrow, and the stag fell where he stood. Seeing him struck, the doe fled.

The hunter came out from his hiding place, skinned the carcass, roasted some of the meat over the embers and ate it, then carried the rest home to his children. The doe whose company the stag had longed for above all else was already gone, fled out of sight, by the time he died.

A spirit dwelling in that forest, the Bodhisatta in that existence, had watched the whole episode unfold from a distance. Moved by what he had seen, he reflected that it was not any bond of kinship that had destroyed the foolish stag, but passion alone, a force whose beginning feels like happiness and whose end is sorrow and ruin. He taught that a creature ruled by craving will walk open-eyed into danger and meet its end alone when the danger becomes real. The lesson is not that fondness for a companion is wicked, but that desire left unwatched blinds a creature to every warning, even a warning spoken by the very one it loves.

Having finished the story, the Buddha identified its characters for the troubled monk. The young stag undone by his own longing was the monk himself in an earlier existence. The doe who escaped and left him behind was the same woman who was now, in this life, his former wife. The woodland spirit who witnessed the tragedy and understood its meaning was the Buddha himself, present even then as the Bodhisatta.

Hearing how closely his own situation matched the stag's fate, the monk understood that the craving he still felt for his former wife had once already cost him his life. The Buddha then taught the Four Noble Truths. Struck by this recognition, he set his longing aside, and the Jataka records that he reached the fruit of stream-entry (the first stage of awakening on the path to enlightenment), the first firm foothold on the path the Buddha had shown him.