Rukkhadhamma Jātaka

The Buddha told this story while residing at Jetavana monastery, prompted by a bitter quarrel over the waters of the Rohiṇī river that had set his own Sakyan clan (the Buddha's own people) and the related Koliyan clan against one another and brought needless suffering upon both sides. Seeing the danger of division spreading through blood relatives who should have stood together, the Teacher traveled to the riverbank, seated the quarreling families before him, and recounted this tale of the trees to show what becomes of those who abandon unity for pride and isolation.

In the distant past, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the great deva-king Vessavaṇa, guardian of the Northern Quarter, died after his long span of merit was exhausted. Sakka, ruler of the gods, appointed a new Vessavaṇa in his place. The old assignments of dwellings had lapsed with the change of reign. So one of the newly installed guardian's first acts was to issue a decree to every tree-spirit (rukkhadevatā) across the continent of Jambudīpa: each spirit was to search out and claim a suitable tree, shrub, or grove as a permanent dwelling.

At that time the Bodhisatta had been reborn as a wise tree-spirit dwelling in a dense sal forest at the foot of the Himalayas. This birth story, recorded as No. 74 in the canonical count of the Ekanipāta, opens with the Bodhisatta gathering his many kindred spirits to advise them before they scattered to choose homes. He said: 'Beloved kinsmen, when you search for a tree to inhabit, do not choose a solitary giant standing alone in an open plain or near a village, however broad its crown. Choose instead a tree that grows clustered together with others in a deep forest, where root meets root beneath the soil and branch leans on branch above.'

Many prudent and unassuming tree-devas took this counsel to heart and settled together with the Bodhisatta in the close-grown sal forest, content to live unseen by human eyes in exchange for safety. They valued the quiet protection of numbers over any hope of grand offerings.

A number of arrogant tree-devas, however, mocked the Bodhisatta's advice. 'Why should we crowd into an obscure wilderness where no one brings us garlands or incense?' they said. 'We shall dwell in the great solitary trees that stand like monuments beside the high roads and outside the towns.' There, they claimed, villagers would shower them with flowers and rich offerings. So they took up residence in towering banyans, pipal trees, and cotton-trees standing alone in the open meadows and at the city gates.

Some time afterward, a violent tempest swept across the land. The gales tore over the open plains with nothing to check their force, and when they struck the solitary giants standing in the meadows, the result was catastrophic: thick trunks snapped like dry reeds, heavy limbs were torn away, and colossal roots were wrenched whole out of the earth, flinging the great trees to the ground and leaving their resident spirits without shelter, weeping in the wreckage.

When the same storm drove into the dense Himalayan sal forest, it met a different fate. Hundreds of trees stood shoulder to shoulder, their crowns breaking the wind for one another. Their roots were locked together underground in an unbroken web. Not a single tree in that forest was uprooted, and not even a small branch was snapped off.

Homeless, drenched, and humiliated, the spirits who had lost their dwellings gathered their children and made their way to the Himalayas. There they told the forest spirits of their sufferings, and the forest spirits in turn carried the tale to the Bodhisatta.

The Bodhisatta explained that this misfortune had come upon them because they had not heeded wise counsel, and he spoke the verse from which this Jātaka takes its name, the Law of Trees (Rukkhadhamma): 'Numerous kinsfolk are a blessing, like the trees that grow together in the forest. The wind carries off a single tree standing alone, however great it may be, but not a grove that stands together.'

Having finished the tale, the Buddha identified the birth for the Sakyan and Koliyan kinsfolk gathered on the riverbank. Those who had been his own loyal followers and disciples in this life, he said, were the humble tree-spirits of the sal forest in that birth. The Bodhisatta who counseled them was the Buddha himself in a former existence. Hearing this, the quarreling families were moved to set aside their dispute over the river's waters and restore peace between their houses.

The Rukkhadhamma Jātaka endures in the Ekanipāta of the Khuddaka Nikāya as the classic scriptural image of sāmaggī, communal harmony. It warns that the hunger for public praise and solitary grandeur exposes beings to a ruin that mutual shelter would have prevented. And it teaches every generation of readers, Buddhist or not, that security is found not in isolated splendor but in roots that hold each other fast beneath the same earth.