Kharaputta Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 386 of the Chakkanipata's Kharaputtavagga as recorded in the Pali Canon, after a monk confessed that memories of the wife he had left behind to enter the monastic life still tempted him toward worldly longing. The Buddha explained that this same woman had once endangered him gravely in a previous life, and related the tale to show exactly how.

In ancient Benares, King Senaka saved a Naga king (one of a race of serpent spirits with the power to take human form) from village boys who were beating him in the street, driving the children away before any lasting harm was done. The grateful Naga king later returned bearing jewels and assigned one of his own Naga maidens to watch over Senaka, granting him as well a charm that would let him understand the speech of every creature.

In time, the Naga maiden assigned to protect the king slipped away from her human form to mate with a water-snake. When Senaka struck her with a bamboo rod for this betrayal, she returned to the Naga king and misreported the incident, provoking him to send assassins against Senaka. Hearing the truth before the assassins could act, the Naga king recalled them. As recompense for the wrong done, he granted Senaka directly a charm giving him knowledge of every sound in the world, warning him that revealing even a single word of it to anyone would cause him to enter fire and die at once.

Senaka took quiet delight in overhearing the chatter of ants and flies about the palace, and one evening his laughter at their conversation drew his queen's suspicion. When he refused to explain, she wept and starved herself in protest, declaring that even knowing the secret would kill him, she would rather he die telling her than live on without telling. Bound by his own entanglement with her, Senaka at last resolved to reveal the charm and ordered his chariot made ready to ride toward the park, resigned to the death that confession would bring.

Sakka, king of the gods, perceiving the king's folly, transformed himself and the Asura maiden Suja (Asuras being a race of powerful demigods, often rivals of the devas) into a pair of goats and placed them in the road ahead of the approaching chariot. The horses drawing Senaka's chariot watched the goats mating in plain view, and one horse remarked scornfully on the stupidity of goats. The goat, which was Sakka himself, replied that the horse was more foolish still, bound by ropes yet lacking the courage to break free. The king the horse carried, the goat added, was more foolish than either of them, since he was prepared to surrender a priceless, life-sustaining secret merely to satisfy a jealous wife who would be no more faithful for having received it.

Recognizing the teaching aimed at him, Senaka asked the speaking goat for guidance, and Sakka revealed his true form, declaring that life is the chief possession a person has and should never be traded away for another's whim. He advised the king to tell the queen that the charm could only be revealed through a ritual beating, confident that her greed for the secret would make her accept even that condition. Senaka returned to the palace, proposed exactly this to the queen, and when she consented, had her flogged until she renounced her demand entirely, preserving both his life and his secret without ever breaking his word to the Naga king.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Sariputta had been the horse who first mocked the goats' folly, the dissatisfied monk of the present had been King Senaka, and his former wife had been the queen whose jealousy nearly cost the king his life. The Buddha himself had been Sakka, who intervened not by forbidding the king's entanglement outright but by giving him a way to satisfy honor, secrecy, and survival all at once. The jataka holds up Sakka's solution as a model of practical wisdom distinct from mere prohibition. Rather than simply telling Senaka to refuse his queen, which his own infatuation had already proven he could not sustain, the god supplied a stratagem that let the king's devotion to his wife and his duty to his secret both survive intact, each satisfied by a single clever reframing of the demand.