Makkata Jataka

The Buddha told the Makkata Jataka, No. 173 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana because of a monk known among the brethren for his habit of trickery. The Buddha told the assembly that this was not the first time the man had turned out to be a rogue, and that in an ancient existence, when he had been born as a monkey, he had played the very same kind of trick for the sake of a warm fire.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be, in an earlier birth) was born into a brahmin family. After his wife died, he took his young son with him and went to live as a hermit in the Himalayan forest, raising the boy there in the simple discipline of their hermitage.

During the rainy season, father and son sat warming themselves beside a fire inside their hut. Not far off, a monkey caught out in the cold and the driving rain watched them from a distance, shivering, and understood that he would never be welcomed inside looking as he was.

Nearby lay the body of an ascetic who had recently died, and his belongings remained where he had left them: a bark garment, a woven basket, and a crooked walking-stick. The monkey put on the dead man's bark dress, picked up his basket, and took hold of his staff, hoping to pass himself off as a wandering holy man seeking shelter from the storm.

Dressed in this way, the monkey made his way to the hermitage and stood near the entrance, close enough to be seen but keeping enough distance to seem like a modest stranger too polite to intrude uninvited on the warmth of their fire.

The boy noticed him first and, moved by what he took to be an old man's suffering in the cold, called out to his father in verse, asking him to look at the poor old fellow huddled by the palm tree outside, and to let him share the shelter of their hut since they had room enough for one more.

The Bodhisatta looked carefully at the figure before answering his son. He told the boy plainly that no true brahmin ever wore a face like that one, and that the visitor was in fact a monkey, not a man, and so could not be invited inside no matter how convincing his borrowed garments looked at a distance.

Once his disguise had been seen through so plainly, the monkey had nothing left to gain by staying. The Bodhisatta drove him off from the hermitage, and the frightened creature fled back into the wet forest, leaving the dead ascetic's bark cloth, basket, and staff behind him.

When the Buddha had finished the story, he identified its characters for the monks. The trickster monkey who had dressed himself in a dead man's robes to win a place by the fire was the same rogue monk now living among them. The compassionate boy who pleaded for the stranger's comfort was Rahula, the Buddha's own son, in that earlier existence. The father who saw through the disguise at a glance was the Buddha himself.

By tracing the rogue monk's present trickery back to a monkey who once borrowed a dead ascetic's robe for nothing more than warmth, the Buddha showed the brethren that dishonesty of this kind is an old habit rather than a new fault, one that can persist across lifetimes until it is clearly seen and named. The Makkata Jataka keeps its lesson simple and unsentimental: kindness is worth extending to genuine need, but it must be guided by clear sight, since a borrowed robe can imitate holiness without ever possessing it. The boy's compassion was never the fault the story points to; the fault lay entirely with the one who dressed himself in a dead man's garments to exploit that compassion, and it was his father's steady discernment, not any lack of kindness in the household, that kept the small hermitage from being deceived that night.