Makasa Jātaka

Jataka No. 44 of the Pali Canon (a traditional birth-story of the Buddha's past lives, told to teach a moral lesson) was told by the Buddha concerning a hamlet in Magadha where the villagers, troubled by swarms of mosquitoes while working in the jungle, had taken up bows and arrows to shoot at the insects. Loosing arrow after arrow at targets too small and quick to hit, the villagers only wounded one another, crippling themselves through a plan meant to bring them relief. To show them the folly of help given without wisdom, the Buddha recalled an old story from Kasi.

In a border village of Kasi lived an elderly carpenter, bald and grey-haired, who sat one afternoon planing a length of timber in his own workshop. The day was warm, and sweat gathered on his bare scalp as he worked, drawing the attention of a large mosquito that soon settled there and bit him sharply.

The carpenter's son, a dutiful but simple-minded boy who loved his father deeply and wished for nothing more than to be useful to him, happened to be standing nearby. Hearing his father call out in annoyance at the sting, the boy resolved at once to drive the tormentor away himself, eager to show through this small service how much he cared.

Rather than simply waving the insect off with his hand, the boy reached for a heavy felling axe lying nearby, reasoning in his untrained mind that so stubborn a pest deserved a decisive answer. He took his stand behind his father, fixed his eyes on the mosquito resting between the old man's ears, and brought the blade down with all the strength in his arms.

The heavy axe fell true to its mark and claimed the carpenter's life in that same instant, a fate the small, stinging insect could never have brought about on its own. The mosquito, untouched by the blow meant for it, simply flew off unharmed, leaving behind a grief the boy's good intentions could never undo.

The Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be, in this earlier birth), a trader of that same village, had come that day to inspect timber for his own use. He arrived at the workshop just as the household's cries of mourning began, and learned at once what devotion without discernment had cost the family gathered there.

Surveying what had happened, the Bodhisatta spoke the words that would carry this story forward long after the carpenter himself was forgotten: an enemy possessed of sense is safer by far than a friend who acts without it. A thoughtful foe may yet be stayed by reason, while a loving fool, wishing only to help, can bring about a ruin that malice itself might never have intended.

The Buddha closed the story by returning his listeners to their own arrows and their own wounds. The Magadha villagers who had tried to answer a mosquito's bite with a bow had walked, each in their own way, the very same path as a boy who had once answered the same small torment with an axe. In both cases, it was never malice that caused the harm, only eagerness unaccompanied by the wisdom to know which response actually fit the danger at hand.

Long after the particular mosquitoes of Magadha and the particular mosquito of Kasi were both forgotten, the comparison the Bodhisatta first drew in that carpenter's workshop remained exactly as useful. Before reaching for whatever tool lies closest at hand, it is worth asking whether the response being prepared is actually suited to the trouble it means to end. Good intentions alone, however sincere, have never yet been proof against a harm brought on by their own haste, whether the hand holding the weapon belongs to a careless boy or to a whole village of frightened neighbors.