Sambulā Jātaka

Jataka No. 519 of the Pali Canon tells of the royal city of Benares, where King Brahmadatta had a beloved son, Prince Sotthisena, married to Princess Sambula, renowned throughout the court for her beauty and her unyielding virtue. The king, Sotthisena's father, was in that life the Buddha-to-be (the Bodhisatta). Leprosy broke out across the prince's limbs, cracking his skin into sores no physician could heal. Shame and revulsion at his own condition drove him to resolve on retreating alone into the wilderness to die, rather than remain in the palace he had once ruled beside his father.

The court ladies shrank from the prince in disgust, and the king wept at his son's decision. Sambula set aside her silk and gold, dressed herself in simple bark, and declared that a wife without her husband was as empty as a river run dry. She followed Sotthisena into the forest, built a leaf hermitage beside a mountain stream, and tended him daily, cleansing his sores, applying what remedies she could find, and foraging for food through terrain that offered neither comfort nor safety.

One evening, while bathing at a secluded forest pool after gathering herbs, Sambula was seized by a lustful ogre who threatened to devour her if she refused him. Calling on the power of truth and the protection of the guardian deities, she summoned help that arrived from far beyond the forest itself. Sakka, king of the gods, descended with his thunderbolt, struck down the ogre, and bound him with a warning never to threaten a virtuous mortal again.

Free but delayed, Sambula hurried back to the hermitage after dark. She found Sotthisena, embittered by his disease and isolated in his own gloom, greeting her not with relief but with cutting suspicion. He demanded to know what secret company had kept her so late while he lay starving and alone.

Wounded by an accusation she had done nothing to deserve, Sambula lifted her eyes to the stars and made a solemn declaration of truth. If she had ever harbored an unchaste thought toward any other man since the day Sotthisena took her hand, let lightning consume her body on the spot. But if her devotion had remained as pure as a lotus untouched by the mud beneath it, let that same truth destroy the disease consuming her husband.

She poured a vessel of clear spring water over the prince's body. The instant it touched his skin, the rotting scales fell away and the sores closed. His flesh was restored whole and radiant, exactly as it had been before the disease first took hold.

Overcome with shame at his own suspicion, and gratitude for a devotion he had very nearly driven away, Sotthisena returned with Sambula to Benares. King Brahmadatta, having seen his son restored, set aside the throne himself and departed to live the remainder of his life as a forest ascetic. Sotthisena ruled in his place, with Sambula crowned beside him as queen.

In time, however, the very security Sambula's faithfulness had restored to him led Sotthisena to grow careless with the gift he had been given. He drifted toward idle pleasure, neglecting the wife whose devotion had once saved both his body and his throne. His own father, the retired king, finally intervened from his hermitage to remind his son plainly what Sambula's loyalty had actually cost her, and what it still deserved in return.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified Sambula with Mallika and Sotthisena with King Pasenadi, and the ascetic father with himself. The same devotion that had once followed a leprous prince into the wilderness and healed him through nothing but truth was the very devotion Mallika still carried toward a husband. In this life as in that one, Pasenadi did not always remember quickly enough what he had actually been given.