Mora Jataka

The Buddha told the Mora Jataka, No. 159 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana because of a monk who had abandoned his vows after seeing an attractively dressed woman. The Buddha told the brethren that even the wise, after seven hundred years of blameless practice, could be undone in a single moment by the sound of a woman's voice, and then related this old story of a golden peacock to show how such a lapse could happen even to one otherwise guarded by virtue itself.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as a radiant golden peacock dwelling on the golden hill of Dandaka. Each dawn and each dusk, he recited a protective charm in honor of the sun and of the Buddhas who had gone before, and this discipline, kept without fail, became the true source of his safety.

In Benares, Queen Khema dreamed of hearing the golden peacock preach the Dhamma and conceived a deep longing to possess him. The king ordered that the bird be captured and sent hunters into the hills of Dandaka to bring him back.

Across six successive reigns, six hunters in turn tried to snare the golden peacock and failed every time. The very first of them spent seven years pursuing the bird before dying in the attempt, and each hunter after him met the same fate, for as long as the peacock kept his dawn recitation, no snare set for him would ever spring shut.

A seventh hunter, serving a seventh king, studied the pattern more carefully than those before him and noticed that the peacock's charm, recited before he went to feed, was the real reason every trap had failed. Rather than try force again, this hunter looked for a different kind of weakness.

The hunter captured a peahen and trained her to dance at the clap of his hands and to cry out at the snap of his fingers. He set his snare early, before the peacock had yet recited his morning charm, and then made the peahen call.

Hearing her cry, the peacock felt a surge of desire that overtook his usual discipline. For the first time, he stepped toward a feeding ground without first completing his protection, and the moment he did, the snare that had refused every hunter before closed around his foot.

Brought alive before the king of Benares, who intended to eat his flesh in hope of gaining immortality, the peacock asked him plainly how flesh taken from a creature that would die from being eaten could possibly grant anyone else eternal life. He went on to explain that his golden plumage was not magic but the fruit of merit: in an earlier existence he had ruled as a righteous universal monarch (an ideal king said to rule the whole land by virtue alone) who kept the five precepts (the basic moral vows against killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, and intoxicants) without blemish, and such splendor could only be earned, never devoured.

To prove his claim beyond doubt, the peacock told the king to drain the royal lake and dig into its silted bed. There, buried deep in the mud, lay the very jeweled chariot in which that righteous king of long ago had once ridden, exactly as the peacock had said.

Having proven his word, the peacock taught the astonished king that everything built of parts, however splendid, is unstable and bound to pass away in time, and that only Nirvana, final liberation from this constant arising and perishing, remains free of it. Moved by this teaching, the king offered him his entire kingdom in gratitude, but the peacock, his purpose fulfilled, rose into the air and flew back to his golden hill rather than accept it.

When the Buddha finished the story, he told the monks that Ananda had been the king of Benares in that birth, and that he himself had been the golden peacock. The monk who had been undone by a woman's voice was shown, through this old story, exactly how far even long discipline could be undone by a single lapse in mindfulness.

The Mora Jataka does not end by condemning the peacock for his one unguarded moment, nor does it pretend such moments cannot happen to the disciplined. It preserves instead a clear-eyed teaching that protection kept faithfully for years can still fail in an instant when attention wavers, and that what truly endures, unlike gold plumage, jeweled chariots, or even kingdoms freely offered, is nothing composite at all.