Lomasakassapa Jātaka

This account is related in the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā, the canonical Pali Jātaka commentary (Jātaka no. 433), among the Navanipāta tales of the Khuddaka Nikāya.

In ancient times, when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as the son of the king's own family priest. He and the young prince Brahmadatta grew up together as schoolmates, mastering every science side by side under the same teachers. When the old king died and his friend ascended the throne, the Bodhisatta looked upon the splendor of court life, found it fleeting and without essence, and renounced his inheritance to become a forest recluse. He withdrew to a cave high in the Himalayas, where thick, long hair grew over his body as his only shelter against the freezing blizzards, earning him the name Lomasakassapa (Hairy Kassapa) throughout the mountain ranges. Practicing relentless self-restraint and meditation for over a century, he attained the five higher spiritual powers (abhiññā) and the eight meditative attainments (samāpatti). The radiance of his unyielding virtue burned so fiercely that it shook the very throne of Sakka, king of the gods.

Sakka grew uneasy. 'This ascetic,' he thought, 'by the exceedingly fierce fire of his virtue, may yet make me fall from my own heavenly abode.' Resolving to break the hermit's power before it could unseat him, Sakka descended to King Brahmadatta's chamber at midnight and made him a bewitching promise: if the one truly virtuous ascetic in the land could be persuaded to preside over a great sacrifice of four-footed beasts, the king would become sovereign over all India, untouched by old age or death. Brahmadatta, remembering his boyhood friend in the mountains, sent his wisest minister, Sayha, into the Himalayas with rich gifts and the offer of half the kingdom. But Lomasakassapa refused his old friend's envoy without hesitation, declaring that kingship was nothing but a venomous snake he would never again take into his hand.

When Sayha returned empty-handed, Sakka appeared to the king once more. Wealth and land could not move the hermit, he said, but no one born of woman is wholly free of the subtlest craving — let the king send his own daughter. So Brahmadatta commanded Sayha to bring Princess Candavatī, whose beauty surpassed all mortal women, to the edge of the Himalayan foothills. When Lomasakassapa came down from his hermitage to fetch water, his eyes met the radiant princess, and in that unguarded instant the sensual craving dormant beneath a century of meditation flared into an ungovernable fire. His spiritual powers vanished at once, like mist before noon. Enslaved by sudden desire, the sage agreed to perform the sacrifice the king demanded, in exchange for Princess Candavatī's hand in marriage, and rode back toward Benares at Sayha's side.

In the city, the palace courtyard had been made ready for the rite: elephants, horses, bulls, cows, and other four-footed creatures stood bound in long lines at the sacrificial posts, and a great sword was placed in Lomasakassapa's hands.

As the ascetic lifted the blade above the neck of the royal elephant, the animal looked upon the raised sword, and, terrified at the sight of death, uttered a piercing cry. In an instant every tethered creature joined its voice to that cry of terror, and the whole courtyard rang with the lament of innocent beasts awaiting the blow that had not yet fallen. That sound struck Lomasakassapa like a thunderbolt. He looked at the sword in his hands, at the matted hair and hermit's garb he still wore beneath his royal finery, and at the trembling animals before him, and the veil of infatuation was ripped away in a single stroke. 'Woe is me!' he cried in bitter self-reproach. 'For the fleeting pleasure of a woman's beauty, I was about to slaughter innocent lives and plunge my own soul into the fires of Avīci Hell, the most severe of the Buddhist hells!'

With a mighty heave, the Bodhisatta flung the sword from him, and it rang against the stone. 'This cruel act is of desire the fruit,' he declared before the astonished court; 'the growth of lust I shall cut down to the root.' He condemned the sacrifice as a cruel and deceitful rite that could never purchase heaven with the terror of innocent creatures, and turned to the king: 'Keep your kingdom, O king, and keep fair Candavatī — I will have no more of either.' Seating himself cross-legged in the midst of the arena, he radiated boundless loving-kindness (mettā) toward every bound animal and entered the jhānas (deep states of meditative absorption) once more. His spiritual powers returned in a blaze of light; he taught the king and the assembled court the peril of harming the helpless for one's own desire, severed the ropes of every captive beast with a wave of his hand, and rose into the sky before the astonished multitude, soaring back to his Himalayan retreat to resume his penance.

The Buddha, concluding this teaching to a monk who had grown weary of the holy life and longed to return to the world, revealed that the minister Sayha of that birth was the Elder Sāriputta reborn, while Lomasakassapa the ascetic was the Bodhisatta himself.