Mahasuka Jataka

The Buddha told the Mahasuka Jataka, No. 429 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, for the sake of a monk who lived in a pleasant forest dwelling near a border village in Kosala and received meditation guidance from the Buddha at Jetavana. During a rains retreat (the months monks spend settled in one dwelling during the monsoon), fire destroyed the village, and the alms the monk could gather afterward grew scanty and coarse. Though his dwelling remained as agreeable as ever, his discontent over the poor food kept him from making progress, and after three months he went to Jetavana to say so.

The Buddha told the monk that an ascetic ought to set aside covetous ways and be content with whatever food could be found, and still fulfil every duty of the holy life. He added that even in ancient times, sages who had been reborn as animals, subsisting on nothing more than the powdered dust of a decayed tree that sheltered them, had kept their contentment whole and continued to live by the law of loving-kindness. To show the monk exactly what he meant, the Buddha told the old story of the parrot king.

In the Himalayan region, where the Ganges flowed past a great fig grove, countless parrots made their home among the trees. The Bodhisatta lived there as their parrot king, settled contentedly on his own tree, eating whatever shoot, leaf, bark, or rind was available once the figs themselves had run out, and drinking from the river without complaint.

The parrot king's contentment was not a performance for anyone watching. He lived this way simply because it was how he had chosen to live, untroubled by the loss of fruit that would have driven an ordinary bird elsewhere in search of better feeding grounds. It was this quiet, unforced steadiness that eventually drew the attention of Sakka, king of the gods.

Wishing to see whether the parrot's contentment could hold under real hardship, Sakka used his divine power to wither the fig tree completely, leaving it a bare, hollow stump riddled with holes, exposed to every gust of wind that passed. From the hollows inside the trunk, fine wood dust began to spill out with each new gust.

Rather than abandon his dwelling, the parrot king ate the wood dust that fell from the hollow trunk and continued drinking from the Ganges below, remaining undisturbed by the buffeting wind and the bare sun that now reached him without any leaves overhead to soften it.

Sakka then took the form of an old royal goose and settled near the parrot, urging him in verse to hurry and leave the dead stump behind, asking why he sat alone dreaming over nothing when birds everywhere else naturally followed fruit from tree to tree as it ripened and failed in turn.

The parrot king answered that those who have been close friends since youth, mindful of goodness and of truth, do not set aside the claims of friendship whether life brings weal or brings woe. He had shared years of shelter and nourishment with this tree, and he would not measure his loyalty to it only by what it could still give him now that it had nothing left.

Moved by an answer that showed genuine virtue rather than mere stubbornness, Sakka revealed his true form and granted the parrot's unspoken wish. He restored the tree at once, filling it with fresh leaves and fruit of extraordinary sweetness, so that the grove the parrot king had refused to leave became as full and generous as it had ever been.

When the Buddha had finished the story, he identified its characters for the discouraged monk. Sakka, who tested the parrot's loyalty and then rewarded it, was Anuruddha in the Buddha's own time. The parrot king, who kept faith with his tree through hollow want exactly as he had through plenty, was the Buddha himself in that former existence.

Hearing how the parrot king had measured his loyalty not by what the tree could still give him but by what it had once given, the discouraged monk understood that his own complaints about scanty almsfood missed the same point. The Mahasuka Jataka preserves this teaching plainly: contentment that depends on constant plenty is no contentment at all, and genuine steadiness, whether in a monk's bowl or a parrot's hollow tree, is proved precisely in the seasons when there is little left to receive.