Kutavanija Jataka

Jataka No. 98 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning a cheating merchant of Savatthi. This merchant tried to defraud his honest business partner by prolonging their trade journey, hoping the hardships of the extended travel would wear the other man down, or even cost him his life, before any division of profit had to be settled. To show that such deception always carries the seed of its own exposure, the Buddha recalled an old story of two merchant partners in Benares.

In that former life the Bodhisatta was a merchant named Pandita, the Wise, who formed an equal partnership with another merchant of the same ward (a district of the city) named Atipandita, the Over-Wise. The two gathered goods together, traveled the countryside with a train of wagons, and returned to Benares with a solid profit earned through their shared labor.

When the time came to divide what they had earned, Atipandita refused to accept an equal split. He insisted that his own cleverness, as his very name declared, had been the true engine behind the business, and that he therefore deserved a greater portion of the profit than his partner, who had merely carried out the work alongside him.

Pandita saw no reason his partner's claim to superior wisdom should translate into a larger share of wealth they had earned together in equal labor. The two merchants found themselves at an impasse, neither willing to resolve it by simply giving way to the other's demand.

Rather than accept arbitration by any ordinary judge, Atipandita proposed that the matter be referred to the tree spirit believed to inhabit a great hollow banyan standing near the city, confident that he alone knew what verdict that spirit would actually deliver.

In secret, Atipandita visited his own elderly father and persuaded him to climb into the spacious hollow of the banyan's trunk, instructing him to speak as though he were the tree's own resident spirit the moment anyone came asking who deserved the larger share.

When the two merchants and a gathering of onlookers assembled before the tree the next day, a hollow, otherworldly voice rose from within the trunk. It declared, exactly as Atipandita had arranged, that the partner claiming greater wisdom had rightfully earned the greater share.

Pandita was unconvinced that any true spirit would settle a dispute over coin in such a manner. He gathered dry brushwood and kindling around the base of the hollow trunk and set it alight. As thick smoke poured into the cavity, the voice inside abandoned its otherworldly disguise entirely, coughing and crying out in the unmistakable voice of an ordinary old man desperate for the fire to stop.

Half-roasted and gasping, Atipandita's own father clambered up onto a bough of the tree and fell to the ground before everyone present, the fraud laid bare in a single moment.

As he fell, the old man spoke a verse of his own: that Pandita had rightly earned his name, while Atipandita had wrongly earned his, and that through Atipandita he himself had been nearly roasted. The two merchants then divided the profits equally. Cleverness twisted toward deception had very nearly consumed the father Atipandita placed inside the tree to serve his fraud.

The Buddha closed the story by returning to the cheating merchant of Savatthi. His own scheme to prolong a journey and exhaust his honest partner answered to the very same truth as the hollow tree's exposed deception. Trickery aimed at gaining an unearned advantage inevitably turns on the one who devised it, however cleverly it may have been constructed to seem beyond suspicion.