Mahā-Mora Jātaka

The Buddha told this Jātaka, No. 491 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya (Pakiṇṇaka-nipāta), at Jetavana concerning a monk who had surrendered to lust and abandoned his vows, returning to the life of a layman. When the brethren brought the backsliding monk before him, the Buddha said that desire had confounded holy beings who, for seven thousand years, had held aloof from every craving that arises within the heart, and that such passion sweeps through even the most disciplined mind as a hurricane makes a withered leaf seem insignificant. To show how far this was true, he told the old story of a golden peacock.

In the kingdom of Benares, while Brahmadatta reigned, the Bodhisatta was conceived by a peahen in a border region and hatched as a peacock whose plumage shone like beaten gold. Knowing that such beauty would draw the eyes of hunters and bring him only danger among men, he left the lowlands while still young and flew alone into the Himalayas. There he settled on the fourth range of the mountains, in a forest beside a vast lake thick with lotuses, near a banyan tree and a cave that could be reached from neither above nor below — a refuge safe from both beast and man.

Each morning, as the sun climbed over the eastern ridges, the golden peacock faced the east and recited a hymn of homage to the sun and to the Buddhas and arahants who had gone before, asking their protection through the day that lay ahead. Each evening, facing west as the sun went down, he recited a second hymn for the safety of the night. It was this discipline, kept without a single lapse, that preserved him unharmed for seven thousand years — not any magic in his feathers.

In Benares, the chief queen, whose name was Khemā, dreamed one night that a golden peacock sat teaching the Dhamma in a human voice. Waking, she told the king that she craved to hear such a peacock speak, as though the longing were the craving of pregnancy, and begged that the bird be found and brought to her. The king sent out a hunter, promising besides that whoever tasted the peacock's flesh would gain unfading youth. That first hunter perished in the wilderness before he could lay a hand on the bird, and the queen herself died still unfulfilled. In his anger and grief, the king had the peacock's whereabouts and the promise of immortality inscribed on a golden plate kept in the treasury, so that the hunt would not be forgotten.

Across six succeeding reigns, six kings in turn read that golden plate and sent six hunters into the Himalayas to capture the peacock, No. 491's telling notes, and every one of them failed and died in the attempt. The bird's own discipline undid their every snare: for as long as he completed his dawn and dusk recitations without fail, no trap laid for him could ever close.

A seventh hunter took up the hunt and spent seven years in the forest watching the peacock before he understood anything. He noticed that the bird never moved from his roost until he had finished his morning hymn, and that this unbroken practice, not chance, was what had defeated every snare before his own. Reasoning that force and ordinary cunning could not touch such discipline, he went to a border village, caught a wild peahen, and trained her over time to dance at the clap of his hands and to cry out at the snap of his fingers.

The hunter carried the trained peahen back to the mountain and set his snare in the dark, before the peacock had yet risen to recite his protective hymn. At the right moment he snapped his fingers, and the peahen's call rang out across the ridge. Hearing it, the golden peacock felt a sudden, unfamiliar stirring of desire, and for the first time in seven thousand years he moved from his roost without having spoken a single word of his morning charm. His foot came down directly into the waiting noose.

Seeing the hunter draw near with his bow raised, the peacock feared he was about to be killed outright, and he called out in verse, pleading that he be kept alive and carried before the king rather than slain where he stood: if spared, he said, he would surely bring the hunter a rich reward from the king's own treasury, far greater than anything his death could offer. He asked only not to be wounded, but to be taken living.

The hunter answered that he had no wish to kill him at all; he meant only to cut the cord and set him free. The peacock, astonished, asked how a man who had pursued him for seven years with such patience could now, at the very moment of success, choose mercy instead of profit. In his wonder, he began to question the hunter about the fruits of such an act — whether sparing a captured life earns any reward in the life to come, and whether virtue of this kind truly matters beyond this one existence.

The hunter, in turn, asked the peacock to teach him plainly what reward, if any, awaited one who chose compassion over gain. The peacock answered with a deeper question of his own, asking the hunter to consider whether there exist gods and a world beyond the one visible to the eye, and whether deeds bear fruit only in this single life or ripen onward into others. Shaken by these questions, the hunter asked in turn how a man might act so as to escape rebirth in the lower, suffering realms altogether.

In answering him, the peacock spoke of virtuous ascetics clothed in the yellow robe who hold knowledge of both this world and the next, and of the three marks that mark all conditioned existence — its impermanence, its unsatisfactoriness, and its lack of any abiding self. As the hunter listened and turned these truths over in his mind, understanding ripened in him all at once. In that same instant, the hunter penetrated the wisdom of a Pacceka Buddha (one who awakens alone, without founding a teaching), and the peacock was released from the snare, both events occurring together as one.

Transformed, the newly enlightened hunter did not return home in silence. Instead he made a solemn Act of Truth, declaring that all the birds he had trapped and caged in his own house over the years — hundreds upon hundreds of them — were that day given back their lives and their liberty, free to fly home. By the power of this utterance, every bird he had confined was loosed at once, and the same truth-force spread outward until every captive creature throughout India, caged by any hand, found itself free.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha declared the Four Truths to the assembly, upon which the backsliding monk who had prompted the telling became an Arahat (one who has reached full awakening). The Buddha then revealed that he himself had been the golden peacock king of that ancient forest in the Himalayas; the Jātaka names no other character — not the hunter, the king, nor Queen Khemā — as a particular past birth of anyone then living, leaving the hunter's own awakening as a wonder complete in itself.

The Mahā-Mora Jātaka does not pretend that seven thousand years of unbroken discipline makes any being immune to desire forever; a single unguarded dawn was enough to undo what ages of practice had preserved. Yet it closes by showing that a moment's true teaching, honestly given and honestly received, can accomplish what even that long discipline could not: it freed not only the peacock from his hunter's cord, but the hunter from his own trade, and through him, every caged bird in the land from its bonds, all in the space of a few spoken verses.