Kuṇāla Jātaka

Jataka No. 536 of the Pali Canon, the Maha-Kunala Jataka, opens during the Blessed One's ministry. Five hundred young men, two hundred and fifty of his own Sakyan clan and two hundred and fifty of the neighbouring Koliyan clan, had renounced the world together after the Buddha ended their quarrel over the waters of the Rohini river. After taking the yellow robe, their minds grew troubled by memories of the wives and households they had left behind in Kapilavatthu, and some were close to returning to lay life. Perceiving their distress, the Buddha led them to the Himalayas, to the beauty of Mount Gandhamadana and the still waters of Lake Kunala. There he told them the story of a bird who had once lived on that very lake and settled this same question for himself, long before.

In that distant age, the Bodhisatta lived beside the lake as Kunala, king of the Citrakokila cuckoos. He ruled over a great company of hen birds whom he treated with open scorn. Nearby lived his friend Punnamukha, king of the Phussakokilas, who doted on his own hens and could not understand his friend's harshness. When Punnamukha asked him why he showed his ladies so little tenderness, Kunala answered simply that he knew too much about women to trust them.

Before long, Punnamukha himself fell gravely ill. The very hens he had cherished deserted him at once, flying off to attach themselves to Kunala instead. Kunala drove every one of them away and stayed by his friend's side, nursing him back to health with the loyalty the hens had failed to show. Only once Punnamukha had recovered did Kunala sit down on the Manosilatala, a slab of stone beside the lake, and begin at last to explain, at length, exactly what he knew about women and why he knew it.

Kunala's discourse unfolded as a long sequence of verses on the nature of desire, drawing on stories of queens and lovers whose charm had concealed betrayal. A man who stakes his peace of mind on the constancy of another's affection, he warned, builds his shelter on ground that is already giving way beneath him; passion flatters the senses precisely where it means to deceive them. The sage, he said, should pass through the world the way water passes over a lotus leaf, touching it everywhere and clinging to it nowhere. The tradition remembers this image in its own words as vari pokkharapatte va, water on the leaf of a lotus, an image later echoed in the Dhammapada's own teaching on non-attachment. Kunala turned next to the body itself, stripping away its ornament in a few blunt lines. What admirers dressed in sandalwood and gold was, underneath, only a frame of bone bound by sinew, carrying blood, bile, and refuse. However it was perfumed in the meantime, he said, it was bound in the end for the same patient worms.

Kunala's was not the only testimony offered that day. Many creatures had gathered on the lake's shore to hear him. Among them, Ananda, king of the vultures, rose next and added his own account of women's wickedness, drawn, he said, from what he had seen for himself. After him the ascetic Narada spoke in turn, adding still more such histories from his own long experience. Three speakers pressed the same lesson from three different lives — a bird, a vulture, and a human ascetic — each claiming to know the matter at first hand, until the case against blind infatuation stood built from more than one witness and more than one kind of regret.

The Sakyan and Koliyan monks who had been ready to abandon the robe for the memory of a wife heard this teaching echo across the mountain where the Buddha had brought them. The fever of that longing broke. Seeing at last how little any of it could be trusted to last, they turned their attention instead to the impermanence of all conditioned things. It is said that every one of them realized the fruit of Arahatship that very day, on the same slopes where a bird long before them had first worked out, for his own peace, the very same truth.