Mitacinti Jataka

This jataka of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning two aged monks who had spent a rainy season together in a forest in the country, intending all along to travel and see the Buddha once the season ended. Each time the moment to set out arrived, one reason or another persuaded them to wait a little longer. Day after day slipped past, until three months were gone, and their intended visit still had not begun. To show them the cost of such endless postponement, the Buddha recalled an old story of three fish who had once lived in a great river near Benares.

In that former life, three fish made their home together in the river's waters. Bahucinti's name meant one who thinks too much, forever weighing every option without ever settling on one. Appacinti's name meant one who thinks too little, drifting through each day with no real attention to danger at all. Mitacinti, the Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be, in this earlier birth), bore a name that meant one who thinks in right measure, neither paralyzed by endless deliberation nor careless through simple laziness.

In the days of King Brahmadatta of Benares, the three fish had swum downstream from the wild country to a stretch of the river where people lived, and where fishermen worked with nets, basket-traps and similar tackle.

Mitacinti saw at once that this place was dangerous. He told his two companions that fishermen used nets and traps here, and urged them to turn back and return to the wild country while they still could.

Bahucinti and Appacinti were lazy and greedy, and neither would go. They kept delaying from one day to the next, and so three months went by, mirroring the postponement of the two monks.

Then the fishermen cast their net into the river. Bahucinti and Appacinti, swimming ahead in search of food, rushed blindly into it. Mitacinti, following behind, saw the net and what had happened to them. The one was undone by a caution that never turned into action, the other by a carelessness that never took the danger seriously.

Mitacinti resolved to save them. First he darted around the net and splashed in front of it, like a fish that had broken through and was heading upstream. Then he doubled back and splashed behind it, like a fish that had broken through and was heading downstream.

The fishermen, believing the net had been torn and the fish had escaped, drew it in by one corner. In that moment the two trapped fish slipped out into open water, and all three were safe.

The Buddha closed the story by returning to the two monks whose own endless postponement had kept them, day after day, from the visit they had always intended to make. Bahucinti's unending deliberation and Appacinti's careless drifting were, in the end, simply two different roads to the very same net. Only Mitacinti's measured attentiveness, neither too much thought nor too little, had carried anyone safely through to the far side of the danger.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the two aged monks with Bahucinti and Appacinti. A mind forever weighing options without choosing, and a mind too careless to weigh anything at all, lead to the very same place in the end, however differently they begin. A visit postponed indefinitely by over-deliberation is no closer to happening than one never considered in the first place. Both monks, hearing this, recognized in the two trapped fish exactly the pattern their own repeated delays had followed, day after day, without either of them ever quite noticing it at the time. The commentary adds that the fish received their names from their habits of thinking, and that the two trapped fish owed their lives to Mitacinti's measured action. When the Buddha had expounded the Four Truths, the two aged monks attained the fruition of the First Path.