Puppharatta Jataka

A monk of the Buddha's order, who had given up his household life to be ordained, found himself once again consumed by longing for the wife he had left behind. The Buddha, seeing his struggle, told him that this same woman had done him harm once before, in a life neither of them now remembered. This story, preserved as the Puppharatta Jataka, No. 147 of the Ekanipata in the Jatakatthavannana, shows what that harm had been.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, a poor man and his wife prepared, as the whole city did, to attend the great Kattika festival, the autumn festival of lights celebrated under the full moon with drumming and crowds filling every street. His wife declared she would not go unless she had cloth dyed with safflower, the rich crimson dye reserved for the wealthy. She wanted it to wear over her shoulders and beneath her arms as she walked beside him through the crowds. The man protested that they had no means to buy such a thing, but she would not relent. At last she suggested that the king's own conservatory, where the safflower plants grew under guard, held all the dye-flowers he could ever need.

Worn down by her insistence and unwilling to face her disappointment, the man at last agreed, and under cover of darkness he broke through the fence of the royal conservatory to steal the flowers his wife wanted so badly. The king's watchmen caught him breaking through the fence, bound his hands behind his back, and dragged him before the king at first light. For trespass and theft from the royal grounds, the king ordered him impaled on a stake outside the city.

As he hung dying on the stake, crows settled on his head and began to peck at him even before his breath had left him, yet his mind held nothing of his own suffering. His only thought was for his wife, and with his last strength he spoke a verse. Being pierced on the stake was no true suffering to him, he said, but his wife, deprived of her safflower cloth because of his capture, would now have to miss the festival without his arms around her. He died still grieving her disappointment rather than his own death, his final words shaped entirely around a festival he would now never see her enjoy.

A spirit of the air had witnessed the entire episode, from the wife's demand to the man's execution. It was this spirit who carried the story forward as a teaching on the blindness that attachment produces: a man could lose his life to a stake through the body and still spend his final breath mourning not his own death but another's missed festival.

Buddhist tradition classes this story among the tales illustrating nekkhamma, the perfection of renunciation, precisely because of what the dying man does not do. He has every reason, in his final moments, to reflect on his own suffering, to regret the theft that led him there, or to turn his mind toward what might follow his death. Instead his attention stays fixed entirely outward, on his wife's comfort and her enjoyment of a festival he will not live to see. The story asks its listener to notice how completely attachment can occupy a mind that still has every reason to look elsewhere, even at the very last moment a person is given to do so.

The Buddha closed the story by revealing that the monk's former wife and the wife in the story were one and the same through their many lives together. He himself, the Buddha said, had been the spirit of the air who watched the man die still bound by longing rather than released by the nearness of death. Reminded that this same attachment had once cost a man his life without even granting him the clarity to grieve it, the monk's own longing for his former wife began to loosen, and he returned to his practice with the Jataka's warning fresh in his mind.