Pancavudha Jataka

The Buddha told this tale at Jetavana about a monk who had abandoned his effort toward the spiritual path. Questioned about his backsliding, the monk admitted it openly. Rather than rebuke him outright, the Buddha told him that in bygone days the wise and good had won their victories through dauntless perseverance in the very hour when giving up seemed easiest, and related an ancient story of his own past to show what that perseverance looked like in practice.

During the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born a royal prince. Eight hundred brahmins, reading the signs at his birth, predicted that he would become a mighty king renowned above all others for his mastery of five weapons, peerless across the whole of Jambudipa (the ancient name for the Indian subcontinent). True to this prophecy, he was named Prince Five-Weapons from childhood.

At the proper age, the prince traveled to Takkasila to study under a famous teacher, mastering the arts of war and governance there. Upon completing his training, his teacher presented him with five weapons of his own: a bow with fifty arrows, a sword, a spear, a club, and a shield, the very tools his birth had foretold he would wield.

Returning home to Benares, the prince came to the edge of a dense forest. Villagers there warned him urgently against entering, for a fearsome ogre named Hairy-Grip dwelled within, a creature tall as a palm tree with a head as large as an arbour, who killed every traveler who crossed his path. The prince, undaunted, pressed on alone into the forest regardless.

Deep within the trees, the ogre rose up before him exactly as described, towering and terrible, and declared the prince would be his meal. Prince Five-Weapons answered with his bow, loosing all fifty poisoned arrows at the creature in turn.

Every arrow struck the ogre's thick, shaggy coat and stuck there harmlessly, swallowed by the matted hair without drawing blood. The prince drew his sword and struck; it stuck fast in the fur. He hurled his spear; it stuck. He swung his club with all his strength; it, too, was caught and held by the ogre's pelt, leaving the prince without a single weapon left in hand.

Undeterred even now, the prince struck with his right hand, and it stuck. He struck with his left hand, and it stuck as well. He kicked with his right foot, then his left, and both were caught in turn. In this fashion the prince found himself snared in fivefold wise, every limb and every weapon fastened helplessly to the ogre's body, utterly at the creature's mercy.

Marveling that a man so completely trapped showed no trace of fear, the ogre asked him directly why he did not tremble at the death now certain before him. The prince answered that every life born into the world must surely meet its destined death sooner or later, and that this truth left him nothing left to fear in the manner of his dying.

The prince added a further warning: within his body, he said, lay a sword of adamant that the ogre would never be able to digest, should he choose to swallow him whole. Struck by the sheer scale of the prince's composure in the face of certain death, the ogre judged his courage to be without equal among men and released him unharmed.

Freed from the ogre's grip, the Bodhisatta did not simply depart. He taught the humbled creature about the workings of karma and its consequences, and won from him a vow to keep the five precepts from that day forward. The ogre, once a killer of travelers, became instead the guardian spirit of that same forest, protecting rather than preying upon those who passed through it.

The prince continued on to Benares, where in time he succeeded to the throne and reigned as king, living out a long and virtuous life guided by the same fearless composure that had saved him in the forest, until he passed away at the end of his days.

Closing the teaching, the Buddha identified the ogre Hairy-Grip of that ancient forest as Angulimala (the violent bandit who later became one of the Buddha's own monks) in that same lifetime, and Prince Five-Weapons as himself. He then spoke a verse on the fruit of such perseverance: when no attachment hampers heart or mind, and righteousness is practiced to win peace, the one who walks this path gains the victory and utterly destroys every fetter that binds him.

The Pancavudha Jataka, No. 55 of the Ekanipata in the Pali Canon's Jataka collection, endures as a teaching for exactly the moment the backsliding monk at Jetavana found himself in: the instant when every outward weapon has failed and nothing remains but the resolve within. A prince with no bow, no sword, and no free limb still proved unconquerable, because what could not be bound by sticky fur was never his weapons at all, but the fearless clarity that let him face death and, in doing so, change an ogre's whole life rather than lose his own.