Nacca Jātaka

This story is recorded as Jataka No. 32 in the Ekanipata, the first book of the Pali Jataka collection, its prose preserved in the Jatakatthavannana. In the primordial golden age, the beasts assembled to elect a lion as their king, the fish chose the leviathan Ananda, and the avian kingdom gathered in the Himalayas to elect a splendid, radiant golden mallard, Suvannahamsa, as their sovereign. This King of the Birds was the Bodhisatta.

The golden mallard king had a lovely daughter of luminous grace. The king granted her a rare boon: she was permitted to choose any bird she fancied from across the cosmos as her husband. The king summoned all feathered creatures from every mountain, forest, and sea. Eagles, swans, parrots, partridges, cuckoos, and owls assembled in a vast amphitheater of rock. No suitor was disqualified by rank or plumage before the gathering began; the princess's choice was to be entirely her own, made in full view of every bird who had come hoping to be chosen.

The young princess walked gracefully through the swirling throngs of winged suitors. Her eyes fell upon a resplendent peacock. His neck gleamed like polished lapis lazuli, his crest was like a crown of sapphires, and his tail trailed behind him like a mantle of living emeralds dotted with golden suns. The princess lifted her wing and pointed: "Father, let this magnificent creature be my lord and husband!" A murmur of approval passed through the assembly; among so many ordinary feathers, the peacock's iridescence had made the choice seem, for a moment, entirely obvious.

Hearing of his selection, the vain peacock was seized with manic conceit. Strutting into the center of the congregation, he cried: "You have not yet witnessed the true limits of my breathtaking skill!" Spreading his enormous plumage into a giant fan, he began leaping and twirling in a frenzied dance. In his reckless arrogance and whirling abandon, his feathers tilted up, his wings flared wide, and he shamelessly exposed his bare underparts and rump before the horrified assembly.

The Bodhisatta, watching this vulgar exhibition of conceit, was deeply disgusted. He rose before the birds and spoke in measured, sovereign rebuke: "This creature possesses a glorious voice and iridescent feathers, but he has neither modest shame, Hiri, nor moral dread of vulgarity, Ottappa. I will not give my beloved child to one who dances away his modesty in public!"

Thereupon, the King of Birds betrothed his daughter to his own nephew, a modest, well-mannered young mallard of his own kind. Humiliated and disgraced, the screeching peacock tucked in his plumage and fled the assembly in utter ignominy. No one in the assembly argued the king's judgment; the same birds who had murmured approval at the peacock's beauty only moments before now watched in silence as his own display undid him more thoroughly than any rival's objection could have.

The Buddha told this Jataka after a monk was found to have amassed an unbecoming number of robes and requisites, keeping a storeroom of food prepared by servants in a manner unbefitting a renunciant's simple life. When questioned about this indulgence, the monk lost all composure, tore off his own robes in fury, declared he would go about as he pleased, and stood exposed before the assembled community exactly as the peacock once had. The Buddha identified that same disgraced monk as the vain peacock of this earlier birth, while the Bodhisatta himself had been the golden mallard king whose judgment the peacock's own vanity had cost him everything.

The tale stands in the Jataka tradition as the classical illustration of Hiri and Ottappa, the guardians of the world, showing that outward brilliance without inner modesty and self-command ultimately forfeits what beauty alone had seemed to win. Commentators reading this Jataka alongside its frame story note that both the peacock and the monk lost something they had already, in effect, secured, a bride freely chosen and a life of robes and food already granted, purely through an inability to accept praise, or correction, without losing composure in front of others.