Pānīya Jātaka

Jataka No. 459 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning five hundred householders of Savatthi who had become monks, only to find themselves entertaining thoughts of wrongdoing they had assumed the robe alone would prevent. The Buddha summoned them and taught that even the smallest transgression left unchecked grows into a greater one, and to show how seriously this truth had once been taken, he recalled a story of five ordinary men from Kasi.

In the kingdom of Kasi, five men each carried dormant wisdom from countless past lives, waiting for some small occasion to awaken it. The first was one of two friends who went out to their fields with their drinking-water pots. While his friend was not looking, he secretly drank from the friend's pot. That evening, after bathing, he reflected on what he had done and was overtaken by remorse. A man who could not restrain himself from a sip of unoffered water today, he reasoned, would be dragged by that same weakness into far greater theft tomorrow. Resolving to overcome the fault, he gained supernatural insight and became a Pacceka Buddha (one who reaches enlightenment alone, without teaching others) on the strength of that single swallow.

The second man was a landowner walking in the bazaar when he saw a woman of great beauty being led along by her husband. He looked at her with desire for a moment, and then recognized the danger in that desire and was shaken. Even a thought of another man's wife, left unexamined, could grow into a fire no later restraint would be able to put out. Turning his mind to insight, he became a Pacceka Buddha.

The third was a son travelling with his father when robbers stopped them at the entrance of a forest. The robbers meant to keep one of them as a hostage and send the other away to fetch a ransom. Unwilling to be parted, the two agreed to deny that they were kin, and when the robbers questioned them they said they were strangers. It was a deliberate lie. That evening, after bathing, the son recalled it and was filled with remorse: even a lie told for the sake of staying beside a loved one cracked the integrity of speech. He became a Pacceka Buddha, taught his father in the air above him, and went on to the Nandamula cave in the Himalayas.

The fourth, a landowner of Kasi, had forbidden the killing of animals. When the people asked whether they should hold their traditional offering to the spirits, he told them to do as they had always done, and they slaughtered many animals. Looking on the heaps of flesh and fish, he grieved that all these deaths had come from his word alone. Standing at a window, he turned his mind inward, became a Pacceka Buddha, taught in the air, and went to the same cave.

The fifth, another landowner of Kasi, had banned the sale of liquor. When the people asked about their customary drinking festival, he again told them to carry on as before. The festival ended in drunken quarrels, broken limbs, and cracked heads. He saw that all this suffering would not have happened had he not allowed it. Though the matter seemed small, remorse overtook him. He became a Pacceka Buddha, urged the people to be vigilant as he taught from the air, and went to the cave.

Each of the five, having reached awakening, flew through the air to the Nandamula cave in the Himalayas. In time they came to Benares to go for alms, and King Brahmadatta, the Bodhisatta in that life, invited them into his palace. He washed their feet, anointed them with fragrant oil, served them food, and asked, respectfully, what had led each of them to leave the world.

Each sage answered in a verse, naming his own small fault, and saying that he had loathed it and left the world so as not to commit it again. Hearing the stolen water, the lustful glance, the lie to the robbers, the sacrifice, and the festival named one by one, the king praised them, gave them robes and medicines, and let them go. Then, alone, he reflected on his own condition, caught up in the cares of a palace and a kingdom, and his taste for sensual pleasures fell away.

The king withdrew to his chamber, sat gazing at a white wall until he attained meditative absorption, and spoke a verse condemning desire. His chief queen, hearing it, came to his door and praised sensual pleasure as a joy beyond compare. The king answered her sternly in verse, saying that desire was worse than a sharpened sword, a deep pit of embers, a heated ploughshare, or poison. Then he told his courtiers to govern the kingdom and renounced the world amid the lamentations of the crowd. He flew to the Himalayas, built a hermitage, lived there as a sage cultivating the divine abodes of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, and in time was reborn in the Brahma world.

At the story's end, the Buddha taught the Truths, and the five hundred monks became arahats. He identified the five Pacceka Buddhas as those who attained final Nibbana, the queen who had praised desire as Rahulamata, and the king as himself. No fault, he taught, is ever too small to be worth examining before it has the chance to grow.