Losaka Jataka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana concerning the Elder Losaka Tissa. The monks had noticed that this Elder, though he had become an Arahant (a fully liberated being), was strangely unlucky in one respect. Wherever he went for alms, he received almost nothing, and they wondered aloud how a man so unfortunate could also have reached the highest fruit of the path. The Buddha answered that Losaka Tissa's own past deeds were the cause of both things at once, his poverty and his liberation, and he told this account to show how. The story is remembered as the Losaka-Jataka, No. 41 of the collection.

Long before, in the age of Kassapa Buddha, a monk lived in a village monastery supported by a devoted squire. One day a traveling Arahant Elder arrived seeking lodging, and the squire, delighted to host so accomplished a guest, welcomed him warmly and invited him to receive alms the next morning. The resident monk, watching this, was seized by jealousy. He feared that his own place in the squire's affection and generosity would be lost to this newly arrived guest.

When the squire came the next day asking after the visiting Elder, the resident monk lied to him. He claimed that he had knocked the monastery gong and tapped at the Elder's door but could not wake him, suggesting that the rich food offered the day before must have disagreed with the visitor. Trusting this account, the squire prepared a special dish instead for the resident monk himself to carry to the Elder: rice and milk, rich with ghee, sugar, and honey.

Rather than deliver this gift, the jealous monk could not bear the thought of the Elder enjoying such fine food in his own monastery. He went to a field that had recently been burned over and scraped a hollow in the embers. He flung the rice and milk into the hole and covered it back over with the burning ash, destroying the offering entirely rather than let another receive it.

The consequence of this single act of hidden cruelty followed the monk across an immense span of time. He suffered first in the hell called Avici for what the tradition describes as hundreds of thousands of years. When that torment ended, he was reborn five hundred times in succession as a hungry ghost, finding enough to eat only once in each of those lives, and that once only a mouthful of offal. After those five hundred lives he was reborn five hundred times more as a dog, again satisfied only once in each life, and that once only from a mouthful of vomit.

Only after this immense chain of hunger did the being take human birth, as a beggar's child in a village of Kasi named Mitta-Vindaka. His family's poverty deepened wherever he lived, until his own parents, worn down by the misfortune that seemed to follow him, beat him and drove him from their home. He wandered to Benares as an outcast with nowhere else to go.

In Benares, Mitta-Vindaka came under the care of the Bodhisatta, who in that life was a teacher instructing students out of charity. But Mitta-Vindaka proved quarrelsome and would not accept correction, resisting every attempt his teacher made to guide him toward better conduct. In time he left to make his own way, eventually becoming a teacher himself in a village, carrying his old nature with him.

Disaster followed Mitta-Vindaka wherever he settled. The villages that took him in suffered fires and royal punishments that seemed to have no other explanation. Eventually the villagers, convinced that his presence itself brought ruin, drove him out with violence, just as his own parents once had.

Fleeing again, Mitta-Vindaka reached a coastal village and boarded a ship bound across the sea. When the vessel stalled inexplicably far from land, the sailors cast lots again and again to find who among them was cursed, and each time the lot fell to Mitta-Vindaka. At last they set him adrift on a raft of bamboo and let the ship sail on without him.

Adrift on the raft, Mitta-Vindaka came upon a succession of wonders. There were palaces of crystal, of silver, of jewels, and finally of gold, each filled with divine maidens offering him welcome and pleasure. Yet in each palace he grew restless and abandoned his good fortune to drift onward in search of something greater, never content with what he had been given. At last an ogress disguised as a goat flung him back across the sea, and he fell into the moat at Benares, where goatherds caught him trying to seize one of the king's goats. The Bodhisatta, now grown old, recognized his former pupil and spoke a verse of warning over him: a headstrong man who, when counseled by friends, refuses to listen, comes in the end to certain harm.

That same chain of misfortune continued into the life the monks had asked about. Reborn once more, this time as Losaka Tissa in a village called Kosaka, his very conception was said to have ruined the fishing of a thousand households. The village he was born into suffered repeated fires and royal punishments until his family was driven out in disgrace. His own mother abandoned him as a small child, leaving him with nothing but a broken potsherd to beg with, and he grew up scavenging rinsings from discarded cooking pots.

At the age of seven, the Elder Sariputta found the starving boy, fed him, and in time ordained him, first as a novice and later as a full monk. Losaka Tissa practiced with sincerity and eventually attained Arahantship, yet his old misfortune followed him even into the holy life: alms simply vanished from his bowl, or givers mistook a bowl barely touched for one already full. On the day the Elder was to pass into final Nibbana (complete liberation from rebirth), Sariputta resolved that he would eat his fill at last. Villagers overlooked them both on the alms round regardless. So Sariputta went himself to the palace, brought back food, and held the bowl with his own hands while Losaka Tissa ate, so that the food could not slip away as it always had before. Losaka Tissa ate his fill for the first time in that life, and died that same day, passing finally beyond rebirth.

Closing the account, the Buddha told the monks plainly who the figures had been. The Elder Losaka Tissa, sitting among them, had been Mitta-Vindaka in that distant birth, the same being who had once buried a bowl of rice and milk in burning ash out of jealousy. The Buddha himself had been the teacher in Benares who tried in vain to correct the headstrong boy, and who later found him again, ruined, trying to steal a goat from the king's herd.

The Losaka-Jataka traces a single thread of cause and consequence across an almost unimaginable span. It runs from one hidden act of jealousy to hundreds of thousands of years in hell, a thousand successive births of hunger, and a final human life still marked by scarcity. Yet the same account insists that this long chain of suffering did not deny Losaka Tissa the path. Even a life weighed down by the fruit of old unwholesome action could still, with sincere effort, reach the end of all rebirth. The jealousy that destroyed one bowl of food cost its bearer dearly across an age, but it could not finally close the door to freedom.