Kulāvaka Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 31 of the Pali Canon, concerning a monk who had drunk water without straining it, unknowingly destroying the tiny creatures living within it. To teach restraint and compassion toward even the smallest life, the Buddha related a tale from a previous birth showing how far such care could be carried.

In the village of Macala in the kingdom of Magadha, the Bodhisatta was born as a young brahmin named Magha, renowned for his generosity and his unwavering keeping of the Five Precepts. Seeing his village given over to drunkenness, gambling, and brawling, Magha organized thirty men, establishing each of them in the same Five Precepts and uniting them in building roads, pavilions, and water-tanks for the benefit of every traveler and villager alike.

The village headman, furious at losing the fines and bribes he had once extorted from drunks and criminals, falsely reported the thirty men to the King of Magadha as a band of robbers. Without investigating, the king ordered them trampled by elephants. Magha instructed his companions to hold fast to the precepts and to meet their persecutors with goodwill rather than fear, and every elephant sent against them refused to approach, turning back instead. When the astonished king asked what spell had protected them, Magha answered that it was no spell at all: not one of the thirty had destroyed life, taken what was not given, misconducted himself, or spoken falsely. The king rewarded the men with the headman's own wealth, made the headman their servant, and granted the entire village into their keeping.

Among Magha's household were four women, Sudhamma, Citta, Nanda, and Sujata, who asked to share in his work of public service. When the men built a communal hall and at first excluded women from the honor of contributing to it, Sudhamma persuaded the carpenter to accept a finished pinnacle she had commissioned, winning the women a place in the merit of the hall. Sudhamma, Citta, and Nanda each contributed further gifts of gardens and water-tanks, while Sujata alone contributed nothing, a difference in devotion that would shape each woman's rebirth in turn.

Upon his death, Magha was reborn as Sakka, King of the Gods, in the heaven of Tavatimsa (literally 'Thirty-Three,' named for its thirty-three gods), and his thirty companions were reborn as gods alongside him. Sudhamma, Citta, and Nanda, whose generosity had included them in the merit of the hall, were reborn as Sakka's own handmaidens, each honored in a realm named for her earlier gift.

Sakka discovered that the ancient Asuras (rival demigods who had long contested the heavens with the gods) shared the heaven of the Thirty-Three with the gods. He resolved to end the arrangement by intoxicating them at a feast and casting them down to the foot of Mount Sineru, the great cosmic mountain of Buddhist cosmology, while they slept. When the Asuras woke and realized what had happened, they gathered their armies and climbed the cosmic mountain to reclaim the heaven that had been theirs.

In the fierce battle that followed, the Asuras gained ground, and Sakka fled in his Chariot of Victory. His charioteer Matali drove them through the Silk-Cotton Forest, where the chariot's passage began felling trees that held the nests of young Garuda birds (giant mythical birds of Buddhist and Hindu legend). Hearing their cries of terror as their nests were destroyed, Sakka commanded Matali to turn the chariot back at once. He declared that he would rather forsake his throne and his life to the Asuras than purchase victory through the deaths of helpless nestlings.

Seeing Sakka's chariot suddenly reverse and race back toward them, the Asuras, with no way to guess the real reason, panicked and took the sudden charge as a sign that reinforcements from across the cosmos had arrived to aid Sakka. They broke ranks and fled into the depths of the ocean, leaving Sakka the heaven of the Thirty-Three without a single further life lost on either side.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Ananda had been Matali, Sakka's faithful charioteer, and the Buddha himself had been Magha, the young reformer who became Sakka. His refusal to let ambition for empire override compassion for the smallest helpless creature proved, across every stage of the story, the same single, unbroken virtue.