Padakusalamanava Jataka

This Jataka was told at Jetavana concerning a seven-year-old son of a householder at Savatthi. The boy could recognize anyone by their footprints alone. Doubting the claim, his father tested him. He walked a winding, deliberately confusing path through the town before the boy set out. The son traced him without fault at every turn, house by house, until he reached the Buddha's presence. When father and son came before the Buddha to resolve the matter, the Blessed One said there was nothing marvelous in reading footsteps on bare earth. Sages of old, he said, had read them even through the air. He then told of a time long past when he himself had possessed this very skill.

In a former age, a queen of Benares sinned gravely against her husband. She swore that if she had indeed wronged him, she would be reborn a horse-faced yakkha, an ogress-spirit of Buddhist folklore. True to her own oath, she was reborn after death as exactly that: a horse-faced ogress dwelling in a rock cave within a vast forest. She was bound for three years to the service of Vessavana, the guardian king of her kind. In exchange, she was given license to seize and devour any traveler who passed along a long stretch of road, thirty leagues (an ancient unit of distance, several days' walk), within her domain.

One day she caught a wealthy, handsome young brahmin walking that road. She intended to devour him as she had devoured so many before him. But his bearing struck her, and she spared his life. She kept him as her husband deep inside her forest, hidden so completely that he could find no way back to the human world he had lost.

A son was born to them, and he grew into the Bodhisatta of this tale. As the boy came of age, his father told him the truth of their captivity. Through careful questioning, the son learned exactly how far his mother's bound territory extended. He resolved that they must escape across its edge, a boundary which she and her kind could never cross. His father had long since resigned himself to this strange life, and needed considerable persuading before he agreed to risk the flight.

They fled while the yakkha was away on her own errands. Father and son reached the river marking the boundary of her domain just as she returned and gave furious chase. She found herself powerless to follow them across that water, and her fury gave way to grief. She called out to her son one final time, not to curse him but to press upon him a parting gift: a charm that would let him trace the footprints of any person on earth. It worked however old the trail, even should twelve years have passed over it, or the trail have left no mark on the ground at all. Heartbroken at the loss of the only family she had known, she did not long survive their departure.

Father and son made their way onward into the human world. In time the youth entered the service of the King of Benares, who had heard of his unusual gift. The king set him to work tracing thieves and lost property by their tracks alone. He served with such unfailing success that the king began to wonder whether the boy's skill had any limit at all. Together with his royal chaplain, the king resolved to find out for himself.

Late one night the king and his chaplain broke into the palace treasury themselves. They took the finest jewels for their own purses. To throw off any pursuer, they went to great lengths: walking backward, stepping onto raised ledges, wading through water. At last they sank the stolen jewels into a tank near the palace and returned quietly to their beds. In the morning, the broken treasury was discovered. The king, feigning the same outrage as everyone else, summoned the youth and commanded him to find the thief before the day was out.

The Bodhisatta read the ground from the treasury door outward. He followed the trail across courtyards and rooftops, even where the tracks seemed to vanish into the empty air, until they led him to the tank. He recovered the jewels untouched. Then, following the fainter trail of the thieves' return journey step by step, he arrived, to his own dismay, at the door of the king's bedchamber and the chaplain's house.

Brought before the full court to name the culprit, the Bodhisatta hesitated. He had no wish to bring ruin on the very king he served. So he answered at first only in riddles: a series of parables, each telling of some refuge that became the very danger it was meant to be. A dancer, drunk, sank in the Ganges that sustains so many. A potter was crushed when his own clay-pit collapsed on him. A man sent into a burning house to save its goods was trapped by smoke and flame. A man died of overeating the food that nourishes others. Birds fled a tree whose branches, rubbing together, had kindled a fire. A wife drove out her aged mother-in-law, and a son drove out his old father. Each parable closed on the same refrain: what should have been a refuge had instead become the peril itself. The king pressed him again and again to speak plainly rather than grasp the warning, leaving the Bodhisatta no further room to withhold the truth.

Before the whole assembly, the Bodhisatta declared the truth. The thieves who had robbed the treasury and hidden their own kingdom's wealth in the mud were none other than the king and his chaplain themselves. The people of Benares learned that the two men sworn above all others to guard the kingdom's trust had instead betrayed it for their own gain. They rose against them in their fury, and by day's end neither the king nor the chaplain remained to answer for what they had done.

In the throne's sudden emptiness, the people turned to the one person among them who had held to the truth at the risk of his own life. They raised the Bodhisatta to be their king. He reigned afterward in righteousness, never placing his own gain above the trust his people had placed in him.

The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the brahmin father of the past story with the venerable Kassapa. In that age, Kassapa had been the man held captive by a yakkha's love. The footprint-reading son, then as now, was the Bodhisatta himself. On hearing this teaching and its identification, the doubting father and his gifted son of the present day both attained the fruit of the first path that very day.

The Padakusalamanava Jataka, No. 432 in the Navanipata's Gijjhavagga, endures as a teaching with a hard edge. Truth, however dangerous to speak, must eventually be spoken plainly. Trust betrayed by those sworn to protect it carries a cost no riddle can soften forever. From a yakkha's grief-stricken parting gift to a kingdom's reckoning with its own rulers, every step of this tale insists on the same point. A guardian who becomes a danger forfeits the very shelter their office was meant to provide.