Salittaka Jataka

A skilled monk from Savatthi, bathing at the river Aciravati, wagered with a younger companion that he could strike a flying swan through the eye. He threw a three-cornered stone first to check the bird's flight, then followed it with a smooth stone that passed clean through both its eyes, and the swan fell dead on the spot. His shocked companion reported what had happened to the Buddha, who rebuked the monk for turning such precise skill to so careless and deadly a use. The Buddha then told the Salittaka Jataka, Jataka No. 107 of the Pali Canon, to show how the very same gift, pinpoint accuracy with a thrown stone, had once been used in a past life for a far gentler purpose.

In a former age, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta served the king as a wise minister. The king's own family priest had a habit no one at court could break: once he began speaking in council, he would not stop, drowning out every other voice and leaving no room for the king's business to be settled. Councils that should have taken an hour stretched on for as long as the chaplain cared to talk, and no one, not even the king, found a way to interrupt him without giving offense.

Around that same time, the king came to learn of a remarkable man who sat, unable to walk, beneath a city banyan tree. He earned coins from passersby by throwing small stones with such precision that he could cut entire shapes, elephants, horses, chariots, into the tree's leaves on command. Onlookers gathered daily to watch him work, calling out whatever shape they wished to see and paying him for the skill of it.

The Bodhisatta proposed to the king a way to put this marksman's gift to use. He suggested that the disabled man be given a pea-shooter loaded with dry pellets of goat's dung and seated behind a curtain with a small hole cut in it. The curtain was positioned directly across from the chaplain's customary seat in the council hall, so that his aim would never be seen by the one it was aimed at.

At the next council, the chaplain began to speak exactly as he always did. Every time his mouth opened wide enough, the hidden marksman sent a small dry pellet through the hole and straight into it. The chaplain, absorbed entirely in the sound of his own voice, swallowed pellet after pellet without ever noticing what he was eating, until a whole pea-shooter's worth had lodged inside him and swelled uncomfortably large.

Once the council ended, the king told the chaplain plainly what had been done to him and suggested, not unkindly, that he take panic-seed and water as an emetic to settle his now-crowded stomach. Mortified at learning how long he had spoken without noticing anything at all entering his own mouth, the chaplain never again let his talk run past what the moment required.

The grateful king granted the marksman four villages, one in each direction, yielding a fortune of a hundred thousand a year from a skill that had once earned him only idle coins beneath a tree. The Bodhisatta summed up the lesson for the king: skill of any kind is worth cultivating. Even a talent as small and strange as throwing pellets through a curtain's slit can, in the right hands, restore an entire court's order without a single person being harmed.

The Buddha concluded by identifying the figures in the tale for the monk who had killed the swan. The disabled marksman was that very monk in a past life, Ananda was the king, and the Bodhisatta was the wise courtier who guided the marksman's gift toward healing rather than harm. The jataka's deeper point reaches back to the frame story itself. The same precise hand that once cured a court's chatter without drawing blood belonged, many lifetimes later, to a monk who used identical skill to kill a bird for sport. No talent is good or bad in itself; everything depends on the purpose to which the hand holding it chooses to put it.