Maha-Vanija Jataka

A group of merchants from Savatthi had once taken refuge in the Buddha and his teaching before setting out on a long business journey. When they returned home safely, laden with an unexpected treasure, they came to the Buddha with offerings and spoke of their good fortune with evident relief.

The merchants explained that a tree-deity had granted them their entire treasure, and they wished to transfer the merit of their gift to that spirit in gratitude. The Buddha told them gently that it was not any tree-deity's gift that had truly saved them but their own moderation, their restraint from a greed that, in an old tale, had once destroyed a very similar caravan down to the very last man. He then told the monks the story, No. 493 of the Jataka collection, the Maha-Vanija Jataka.

Long ago, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was the wise and trusted leader of a caravan of merchants, a man whose counsel the others followed as a matter of course on every journey they undertook together.

The caravan numbered twenty-five merchants in all, traveling together with five hundred carts of merchandise across a vast and barren stretch of wilderness on their way to trade in distant markets.

Deep into the crossing, their water ran out entirely. Under the relentless sun, shimmering mirages confused their sense of direction, and the merchants began to despair, certain that thirst alone would finish what the desert had started. It was in this desperate state that they caught sight of a vast banyan tree ahead, its canopy a deep, cool green rising improbably out of the burning sand.

Reaching the tree at last, the merchants found the ground beneath its branches cool and inviting, a relief after the glare of the open desert. The merchants, looking up, saw that the leaves gleamed as if wet and the branches seemed heavy with water. The Bodhisatta, their caravan chief, stood among them, but it was the merchants who took the tree for something more than ordinary shade.

Hoping to find something to drink, the merchants cut into the eastern branch, and at once clear, sweet water came pouring out in such abundance that every man and every ox in the caravan drank and bathed until their exhaustion was entirely washed away.

Encouraged by this wonder, the merchants went further. Cutting the southern branch brought forth fine food and refreshing drink enough to satisfy every traveler. Cutting the western branch brought lovely attendants who sang and eased their tiredness. Cutting the northern branch, at last, brought a flood of gold, silver, pearls, and jewels, more wealth than the caravan had ever carried, enough in the end to fill all five hundred of their carts to overflowing.

Flush with riches beyond anything they had imagined, the merchants grew bolder still. If four branches alone could produce such treasures, they reasoned among themselves, then the trunk and the roots beneath it must hold wonders greater than anything they had yet seen. They resolved to cut the tree down entirely to claim whatever lay hidden at its base.

The Bodhisatta was appalled at the suggestion and spoke against it firmly. A tree that had given them water, food, comfort, and treasure in such abundance deserved gratitude, not destruction, he told them. No one wise, he said, breaks even a single branch of a tree that has sheltered him, let alone fells the whole trunk that gave him refuge. His warning went unheeded. The merchants took up their axes and struck at the trunk regardless.

The tree was the dwelling of a great Serpent King, and the assault on its trunk roused him to fury at such ingratitude after such generosity. He summoned his full strength to the field: five and twenty mail-clad serpents, three hundred archers, and six thousand more armed with sword and shield, a force that descended upon the caravan in answer to the trunk's wound.

Of all the merchants gathered there, only the Bodhisatta, who alone had spoken against the felling and had counseled gratitude instead of greed, was spared by the Serpent King's forces. The rest of the caravan, the men who had ignored every warning in pursuit of still more wealth, did not survive the Serpent King's answer to their ingratitude.

Moved by the Bodhisatta's restraint and his loyalty to what was right even when it cost him the agreement of his companions, the Serpent King loaded the surviving carts with the finest jewels of the treasure and saw to it that the Bodhisatta reached Benares in safety. When the telling was finished, the Buddha identified the Serpent King of the old tale as Sariputta, and the wise caravan chief who alone had been spared as himself in that distant birth.

The Maha-Vanija Jataka stands as a caution against mistaking generosity for an invitation to take everything a benefactor has to give. The tree gave water, food, companionship, and treasure freely to those who simply asked and received, but it was the demand for still more, the refusal to be satisfied with abundance already granted, that brought its own ruin. No. 493 endures as a measure of moderation itself: a gift repaid with gratitude multiplies in blessing, while a gift met with grasping greed becomes, in the end, the very thing that destroys the one who grasped for it.