Nanda Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 39 of the Pali Canon, concerning a pupil of the elder Sariputta who behaved with perfect humility at Jetavana monastery but grew arrogant and quarrelsome whenever he traveled into the countryside. When this inconsistency came to light, the Buddha explained it by relating a tale from a previous birth in which the same pattern of selective pride had already played out once before.

In the city of Varanasi, an elderly, prosperous householder fathered a son late in his life. Fearing that his young wife might remarry after his death and that a stepfather would squander the boy's inheritance, the old man resolved to hide his wealth rather than leave it visible. Accompanied by his trusted lifelong slave, Nanda, he carried thousands of gold and silver coins into a secluded forest, buried them beneath a grassy knoll, and instructed Nanda to reveal the spot to his son once the boy came of age. Not long afterward, the old man died.

Years later, when the son had grown into a young man, his mother sent him to Nanda to recover his birthright. Nanda led him willingly into the forest, carrying food and spades. The instant he came to stand directly above the buried gold, he turned on the young heir with sudden contempt, hurling insults and calling him the worthless son of a slave-woman. Shocked and wounded, the youth returned home empty-handed. A week later Nanda apologized, claiming a fit of madness, and led him back to the forest, only for the identical scene to repeat itself the moment he stood over the same spot.

Bewildered, the young man brought his trouble to the Bodhisatta, a wise householder who had been his father's friend. Listening carefully, the Bodhisatta explained that Nanda was not mad at all. An inferior nature, standing directly above a vast hidden fortune, becomes swollen with a sudden sense of mastery it would never otherwise feel, mistaking proximity to buried wealth for a claim upon it. The very spot where Nanda heaped his worst abuse, the Bodhisatta said, was certain to be the exact location of the treasure. He advised the young man to let Nanda speak his insults once more, then push him aside and dig beneath his own footprints.

The young man returned to the forest with Nanda, who once again took his stand and began hurling abuse exactly as before. This time the heir seized him by the shoulders, threw him down, and drove his mattock (a digging tool like a heavy hoe) into the earth precisely where Nanda had been standing. Within moments the blade struck the bronze lid of the buried chest, and the young man carried his father's fortune home in triumph, honoring the Bodhisatta's insight with lavish praise.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Sariputta's proud disciple, humble in one setting and arrogant in another, had been the slave Nanda, and the Buddha himself had been the wise householder whose insight into Nanda's shifting pride had restored the young heir's inheritance.

What makes Nanda's behavior so difficult to diagnose through ordinary observation is that it is not constant. He serves faithfully everywhere else in his life, and his contempt surfaces only within a few feet of a specific patch of forest ground. The Bodhisatta's insight depends entirely on refusing to treat this inconsistency as madness or random malice, phenomena that would offer no useful clue, and instead reading it as information precisely because it is so narrowly localized. A servant who insulted his master everywhere would teach nothing about where treasure lay; a servant who insults him only in one place reveals, by that very narrowness, exactly where to dig.

The frame story's monk exhibits a structurally identical inconsistency, meek at the monastery, proud on the road. The jataka invites the same diagnostic habit to be applied to him that the Bodhisatta once applied to Nanda. Buddhist commentary reads the parallel as a caution against assuming that a person's character is uniform across every setting. Whenever someone's conduct shifts sharply from one place to another, it is worth asking what exactly about that place is doing the shifting, since the answer is rarely mere inconsistency. It is often a precise clue to something the person values, fears, or, as in Nanda's case, momentarily believes he has gained power over.