Sakuṇagghi Jātaka

At Jetavana, the Buddha once counselled the monks never to wander from their own alms-round into another's territory. Whoever strays beyond his proper range invites disaster, he warned, and to make the point vivid he told of a time when he himself had learned this very lesson in the form of a small bird. In the ancient realm of Benares, when King Brahmadatta ruled the land, the Bodhisatta was born as a tiny quail who lived contentedly in a ploughed agricultural expanse, feeding safely upon scattered seeds within the shelter of towering furrows and hardened sun-baked clods of earth. Season after season he hopped from clod to clod, gleaning the grass-seed the plough had turned up. He thrived there precisely because the ground itself was his ally: the furrows ran too narrow and the clods stood too close together for any swooping hawk to fold its wings and strike without shattering itself against the hardened earth.

One bright morning, overcome by curiosity and appetite, the little quail wandered far beyond his customary boundaries onto a wide, exposed pasture at the forest's edge, where unfamiliar seeds promised a change from his accustomed fare. Instantly, a ravenous falcon—a bird who in this life bore the name Devadatta—perched upon a high tree, spotted the defenseless bird, folded its wings, and plunged from the sky like a thunderbolt, seizing the trembling quail in its razor talons.

Pinned to the dust, the captive quail began to lament bitterly: 'Alas! How foolish am I to have abandoned my native pasture! Had I stayed within my father's ancestral territory among the protective earthen clods, this swaggering falcon would never have proved a match for me!' Even as the talons bit into his back, he knew that clods piled like hills and furrows too cramped for a diving hawk's wings had kept his whole line safe for generations, and that he alone had broken that long safety for the sake of a moment's idle curiosity.

The falcon, swollen with predator pride and certain that no humble patch of dirt could shield any creature from a hunter who had never once failed to make his kill, scoffed: 'O miserable creature! What could your wretched territory have done to stay my talons? Where is this wondrous fortress of yours?' The quail responded boldly: 'My fortress is the ploughed field where the heavy clods of clay lie piled like mountains!' The haughty falcon sneered: 'Go then! I release you back to your wretched clods! Stand your ground and witness whether your earthen hills can shield you from the terror of my swoop!'

The quail darted back into the ploughed field, scampered to the top of an immense, solid stone-like earthen boulder, and called out: 'Come down now, mighty falcon! I am waiting!' Boiling with rage, the falcon shot like an arrow into the high heavens, tucked its wings, and launched a lethal dive straight at the little bird. At the exact fraction of a second before impact, the quail ducked under the belly of the boulder. Unable to check his violent momentum, the falcon crashed with bone-splintering force against the immovable granite-hard mass, smashing his skull and crushing his breast to pulp. The little quail, trembling but wholly unharmed, hopped down and stood upon the body of the great bird who had so lately held him in its talons, rejoicing that he had seen the back of his enemy at last, and that the very ancestral ground he had abandoned in a moment's folly had, in the end, delivered him whole.

Returning to his monks at Jetavana, the Buddha drew out the lesson folded inside the old tale: 'Even dumb animals fall into the power of their foes when they stray from their own ground into the territory of others. But by staying within their own ground, they prevail even over the mightiest enemy. You too, monks, have your own ground, your own ancestral domain: the four establishments of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna)—mindful contemplation of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of mental phenomena. The territory of others is the five strands of sensual pleasure, agreeable to the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and touch; whoever strays there gives Māra, the Evil One, an opening and a foothold. But whoever abides steadfastly within the four establishments of mindfulness can never be defeated by any tempter.' At the close of the teaching, the Buddha identified the birth. The boastful falcon had been Devadatta, and he himself, in that distant life, had been the quail who turned his own abandoned ground into his deliverance.