Mahā-Palobhana Jātaka

At Jetavana, the Buddha addressed a monk who had grown weary of the solitary life. The monk longed to return to the world his ordination had left behind. Before answering him directly, the Teacher recalled how far a hidden desire can travel. It can reach even a will that believes itself already free of every attachment. To show this fully, he set before the assembly the whole span of a certain prince's life, not merely its final turning.

In the kingdom of Kasi, the king who ruled from Benares with justice and care sorrowed deeply. No son had been born to carry his line forward. In that hour a great being neared the end of a long life among the Brahma gods. For his final span of worldly existence, he chose a human womb and entered the queen's own from that pure, formless heaven. When the child was born he was radiant as a figure cast in gold. Yet from his very first breath he carried into this life the aversion of one who had dwelt where male and female hold no distinction at all.

The infant wept without pause whenever a woman's hands held him, refusing milk and comfort alike. In time the household abandoned the attempt entirely. They raised him only through the hands of men dressed as he was content to see them, in the plain robes of ascetics. The king and his ministers named him Anitthigandha, one who abhors even the scent of women. As the years carried him into his sixteenth year, that early revulsion only deepened into settled discipline. He declined every marriage his father proposed and took no pleasure in music or festival. He gave his days over entirely to study and silent meditation, as though some part of him were still only passing through a human house on the way back to the world he had left.

The king watched his only heir withdraw further each year from the very life a prince is raised to inherit. He grew frantic that his throne would stand empty after him. He proclaimed before the court that whoever could kindle in the prince's heart the ordinary desire other men carried without effort would be rewarded beyond counting. A dancing girl of the palace came forward. She was already celebrated for a voice and a skill at the lute that few in the kingdom could equal, and she asked only for time and the king's patience. She was confident that no vow held since infancy could stand forever against a sound never once resisted.

She took a chamber built against the thin lattice wall that divided her quarters from the prince's own. Rather than approach him directly, she let the mornings and evenings do the work first. At dawn and at dusk, when she knew the prince sat nearby in meditation, she drew out slow, unhurried melodies on her lute. She sang in a voice pitched to wonder rather than to open invitation, songs of dew and daybreak, a longing phrased so gently it scarcely announced itself as longing at all. Day after day the sound crossed the thin wall. It settled into a mind that had never once in its life needed a defense against anything of the kind.

By the seventh morning the prince could no longer let the voice pass unanswered. He called out to ask whose song it was that reached him so sweetly. The dancer timed her entrance with the same patience she had given the music itself, and stepped from behind the lattice with flowers already gathered in her hands. The instant he saw her, the whole weight of a nature the Brahma heavens had never asked him to guard against broke open at once. It was the way dry grass left standing through a dry season gives itself entirely to the first spark that reaches it. The discipline of sixteen years did not bend slowly; it simply ceased to exist.

What came after went far beyond a prince losing his composure. Anitthigandha gave himself to her so completely and so jealously that no other man could pass near her without the prince reaching for his sword. The court that had once admired his restraint now lived in dread of his rage. He carried a drawn blade through corridors where ministers and attendants had served him since childhood. He threatened the life of anyone whose glance lingered on her a moment too long, until the disorder he caused could no longer be contained within the palace walls at all.

His father grieved as much for the danger his own plan had set loose as for the kingdom's safety. He banished the two of them together rather than part them, since neither punishment nor persuasion could now separate the prince from the woman he had once refused to let come near him. Anitthigandha followed her out of the capital without protest. In the wild country that lay between a river and the sea, far from any court, he built a rough shelter for them both, trading the only life he had ever imagined for hers alone.

One day, searching the forest for fruit to bring back to their hut, Anitthigandha came upon a solitary ascetic fleeing in open distress toward the shore. The same woman had passed near the ascetic's retreat on some errand of her own. With a glimpse and a few notes of song, she had unsettled a meditation that years of discipline had built, and the holy man now ran from his own collapsing composure the way a man runs from fire. Anitthigandha recognized in the ascetic's unraveling an exact likeness of his own. He gave chase, not to stop him by force, but to reach him before grief carried him somewhere beyond recovery.

Catching up to him at last, Anitthigandha spoke of women as a danger capable of consuming even the most committed practice. He compared it to fire consuming a field left dry too long, a warning he could never have delivered with any real weight before his own collapse. That collapse alone had shown him from the inside exactly what such consuming felt like. The ascetic was steadied less by the words themselves than by the unmistakable authority of a man who had lived every syllable of them. He recovered his composure and turned back to the practice he had nearly lost for good.

Having spoken the truth aloud to save a stranger, Anitthigandha heard his own warning land on himself with the same force. He returned to the hut only long enough to take leave of the woman for whom he had abandoned every vow he once held. Then he walked alone into the deeper forest. There he took up again the very meditation that no voice had ever been able to reach before a lattice wall carried one through to him. In time he brought that discipline to its fullest measure and was reborn once more among the Brahma gods from whom he had briefly descended.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that he himself had been that prince. He was a being who had come from a realm beyond every trace of desire, and yet he had still been undone, for a season, by a single voice he had never learned to guard against. Jataka No. 507 of the Jatakatthavannana preserves this fuller telling for the discontented monk before him and for every reader after. No aversion, however complete it feels and however exalted its origin, should ever be mistaken for wisdom that has never actually been tested.