Sādhīna Jātaka

The Buddha told this Jātaka, No. 494 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya (the canonical collection of the Buddha's birth-stories), at Jetavana to a gathering of lay followers who had come together to observe the fast-day (uposatha) vows. Praising their devotion, he told them that wise men of old, through keeping these same fast-day vows faithfully, had gone bodily to heaven and dwelt there for a very long time, and he related the ancient story of King Sādhīna to show how far such devotion could carry a mortal.

In the kingdom of Videha, the Bodhisatta was born as King Sādhīna and ruled with righteousness from the city of Mithilā. He established six alms-halls throughout his capital and distributed six hundred thousand pieces of money in charity every single day. Beyond his boundless generosity, he kept the five moral precepts without blemish and observed the fast-day vows himself, inspiring his subjects to take up the same practice.

Word of the king's virtue reached even the heaven of the Thirty-Three. Young princes of that heavenly realm, gathered before Sakka, spoke so highly of Sādhīna's merit that they longed to see him with their own eyes. Moved by their wish, Sakka resolved to bring the righteous king to heaven, and he commanded his charioteer Mātali to fetch him.

On the night of the full moon, Mātali descended in the divine chariot, driving it so close beside the moon's own disk that the people of Mithilā looked up and cried out in wonder, their hair standing on end at the marvel passing overhead. Mātali brought the chariot down to King Sādhīna and invited him to ascend to heaven in his own living body. Having reassured his ministers and his queen, the king stepped aboard and was carried up through the sky.

Sakka received King Sādhīna with great honor and gave him half of the heavenly city to rule as his own — ten thousand leagues of celestial ground, twelve and a half million nymphs to attend him (half of Sakka's twenty-five million), and a share of the palace called Vejayanta. There Sādhīna lived amid splendors no earthly kingdom could match.

King Sādhīna remained in that heaven for seven hundred years by the reckoning of men, enjoying the felicity that his own earthly merit had earned him. Yet even surrounded by such glory, he did not forget that all things built of causes must one day end, and as the fruit of his past deeds slowly ran its course, dissatisfaction began to stir within him.

Sensing his guest's unease, Sakka offered to let him remain in heaven forever, sustained by Sakka's own divine generosity. King Sādhīna declined, answering that he cared nothing for blessings received from another's hand, for what is truly his own comes only from standing on his own deeds. He asked instead to be returned to the world of men, where he might live and act by merit he had earned himself rather than merit lent to him by a god.

Sakka granted the request, and Mātali once again drove the celestial chariot, this time bearing King Sādhīna down out of the sky and setting him gently in the very park at Mithilā from which he had first ascended.

Seven hundred years had passed on earth in the time he had spent in heaven, and the throne of Mithilā now belonged to King Nārada, Sādhīna's own descendant seven generations removed; in those distant days, it is said, human beings lived no longer than a hundred and twenty years. When his descendants wished to restore the crown to him, Sādhīna refused it outright, saying plainly that he wanted no royal crown at all.

Rather than reclaim his former kingdom, King Sādhīna spent his remaining seven days distributing alms as generously as he had in his first reign, and when those seven days had passed, he died and was reborn once more among the gods.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha revealed who each person in the story had become: Ānanda had been King Nārada, Anuruddha had been Sakka, and the Buddha himself had been King Sādhīna.

The Sādhīna Jātaka does not claim that heaven, however vast or long-lasting, can ever be a true possession; even ten thousand leagues of celestial ground and twelve and a half million attendant nymphs remained, in the end, blessings lent by another's hand. What the story preserves instead is the example of a king who kept the fast-day vows faithfully enough to be carried bodily into the company of the gods, and who still chose, at the height of that glory, to return to the harder work of earning his own merit rather than live forever on merit he had not made.