Kuta-Vanija Jataka

At Jetavana, a pious merchant of Savatthi told the Buddha about a dishonest partner who kept delaying the division of their trading profits. The cheat had reasoned that the honest man, worn by the long journey, would overindulge at home and die before a fair split ever had to happen. The Buddha told him that his partner's dishonesty was nothing new; the very same rogue had played the very same game once before, in a far older life, and told the story in full.

In that former age, when Brahmadatta ruled in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was born the son of a court official and later became the Lord Justice. In that city a villager deposited five hundred heavy iron ploughshares with a townsman, his friend, for safekeeping, trusting him to return them when he came to ask for them.

The townsman sold every one of the ploughshares and pocketed the proceeds. To prepare his excuse, he scattered mouse droppings around the spot where the iron had been stored. When the villager came and asked for his ploughshares, the townsman lamented that mice had eaten them, and showed him the droppings.

The villager saw through the lie at once but showed no sign of outrage. He accepted the explanation without quarreling, and let the matter rest while he prepared his answer.

Some time later, the villager took the townsman's young son along to bathe, and left the boy hidden in the inner room of a friend's house. He returned alone. When the townsman asked frantically where his son was, the villager answered that a hawk had seized the boy from the riverbank and flown off with him.

The townsman called this a lie and took the matter to court, and the villager agreed to go. Before the Bodhisatta, the Lord Justice (the being who would, after many more lives, become the Buddha), the townsman argued that his son had been stolen and asked for judgment. The villager repeated the hawk story. When the Bodhisatta asked where hawks carry off boys, the villager answered with a challenge: if mice can eat iron ploughshares, a hawk can carry off a boy, and if mice cannot, neither can a hawk. Then he asked for judgment on whether the ploughshares had really been eaten.

The Bodhisatta saw that the villager was meeting trickery with trickery, and praised the plan as well made. He then spoke two verses. In the first, deceit aimed at a deceiver is well conceived: if mice can devour a ploughshare, why could a hawk not carry off a boy? In the second, for a fraudster there is always more fraud, and cheating answers cheating: let the cheat return the ploughshares, and the man who lost them will return the child. So each got back what he had lost.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the cheat of the past and the cheating partner of the present were one and the same man, and that the clever man was likewise the same across both tellings. The Bodhisatta himself, the Lord Chief Justice who had praised deceit answered with deceit's own logic, was the Buddha. Jataka No. 218 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

The townsman's mouse story was built so that no one could ever disprove it directly; an empty storeroom and a scattering of droppings left nothing for anyone to inspect except the absence of the very iron he had already sold. The villager's answering story about the hawk was built the same way, impossible to verify and impossible to disprove by anyone standing in the marketplace. The two lies were not just similar in spirit; they were constructed by the identical method, which is exactly what let the villager put one beside the other and ask the court to judge them together.

The villager's calm acceptance of the mouse story when he first heard it looks, at a glance, like a man too mild to defend his own property. It was nothing of the kind. He needed time to arrange a safe place for the boy and a second tale sturdy enough to match the first exactly, and showing anger immediately would have warned the townsman to guard himself more carefully. His patience was the first move of the very plan that set the matter before the judge.

The Bodhisatta's judgment did not simply decide which man was telling the truth about his own story, since neither story was true at all. It judged the logic underneath both of them at once, pointing out that anyone willing to claim that mice devour iron had no grounds left to reject an equally impossible claim about a child-carrying hawk. By holding the two fabrications up against each other rather than examining either one alone, the verses made the townsman's own chosen weapon the thing that returned the ploughshares.