The Ruhaka Jātaka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana, and the Jātaka Atthakatha records it as Jātaka No. 191, the Ruhaka Jātaka. A monk had become troubled by longing for the wife he had left behind when he took the robe. The full account of his trouble is given in the Indriya Jātaka, No. 423. The Buddha spoke to him plainly. This was a woman who had done him harm, he said, and in a former time too she had made him blush before a king and his whole court, and given him good reason to leave his home. Then he told an old-world tale.

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was reigning in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as the son of the chief queen. He grew up, and when his father passed away he became king and ruled in righteousness. At his court served a chaplain named Ruhaka. Ruhaka had an old brahmin woman for a wife.

One day the king gave the brahmin a horse, fully fitted out with all its trappings. Ruhaka mounted it and rode out to wait upon the king. As he rode along on his richly dressed steed, the people on either side were loud in its praise. "See that fine horse!" they cried. "What a beauty!"

When he came home, Ruhaka went into his house and told his wife what he had heard. "Goodwife," he said, "our horse is passing fine! Right and left the people are all speaking in its praise."

His wife was full of deceit, and she answered him with a plan. "Ah, husband, you do not know where the beauty of this horse lies. It is all in his fine trappings. If you would make yourself fine like the horse, put on his trappings yourself and go down into the street, prancing along like a horse. The king will see you and praise you, and all the people will praise you."

The brahmin listened to all of this and did not understand what she intended. He believed her, and he did exactly as she said.

Everyone who saw him laughed aloud. "There goes a fine professor!" they said. The king himself cried shame on him. "Why, my teacher," he said, "has your bile gone wrong? Have you lost your senses?"

At this Ruhaka understood that he had behaved badly, and he was ashamed. He was angry with his wife and hurried home, thinking that she had shamed him before the king and all his army. He resolved to punish her and turn her out of his house.

The wife saw that he was coming home in anger. She got ahead of him, slipped out by a side door, and made her way to the palace. She stayed there four or five days.

When the king heard of it, he sent for his chaplain. "My teacher," he said, "all womankind are full of faults. You ought to forgive this lady." To bring him to forgiveness, the king spoke the first verse: even a broken bowstring can be mended and made whole, so forgive your wife and do not keep this anger in your soul.

Ruhaka answered with the second verse. While there is bark, and workmen too, it is easy to buy new bowstrings, he said — meaning that so long as there are trees for bark and craftsmen to work it, a new bowstring is easy to come by, and so is a new wife. He would find another wife, he said, for he had had enough of this one. So he sent her away and took another brahmin woman to wife.

At the end of the discourse the Buddha declared the Truths. The monk who had been tempted by thoughts of his former wife was established in the fruit of the First Path. Then the Buddha named the characters of the old tale. "On that occasion the former wife was the same, Ruhaka was the tempted brother, and I was the king of Benares."

The story is plainly a lesson for a monk who was being pulled back toward a household he had left. Yet it is also a gentle comedy about vanity. Ruhaka took the praise given to a horse as if it had been given to himself, and a clever word was enough to set him prancing through the street.

The Ruhaka Jātaka teaches that honor borrowed from fine trappings is not honor at all. It also asks the listener to look at the people who flatter or guide him, and to notice whose interest their advice serves. The monk in the frame story was invited to see that his old longing had once cost him dignity before a king, and that a wise person does not run back toward the thing that has already shamed him.