Sammodamana Jataka

The Buddha's own kinsmen, the Sakyas and the Koliyas, had shared water from the same river and intermarried for generations without trouble. During a season of drought, they fell into a bitter dispute over the river's flow, and the quarrel grew heated enough to threaten the long peace between the two clans. When word of the quarrel reached the Buddha, he went to the disputing parties himself and told them the Sammodamana Jataka, Jataka No. 33 of the Pali Canon, to show them exactly what their quarrel threatened to cost, using a story from a distant past life in which unity itself had once been the only defense a much smaller and weaker creature possessed.

In a former age, the Bodhisatta was born as a quail who led a flock numbering many thousands across a wide stretch of forest. A fowler discovered where they fed and learned to imitate their call so convincingly that he could draw the entire flock together at will. Once they had gathered, he would cast a single great net over the whole crowded flock, draw its cords tight, and carry his catch to market, returning day after day to take his share of the birds that trusted their leader's call.

Watching hundreds of his flock lost to the fowler's net, the Bodhisatta called the birds together and proposed a plan that depended entirely on every single quail acting as one. The next time the net fell, he told them, each bird should push its head through a different gap in the mesh. Then, on a single signal, all of them would beat their wings together and lift the entire net into the air, carrying it to a thicket of thorns where they could drop it and slip free. The fowler would be left untangling his ruined net from the brambles.

The plan worked exactly as the Bodhisatta had promised. Morning after morning, the net rose into the sky the instant it fell, carried off by thousands of small wings beating in perfect time. The fowler returned home empty-handed so many days in a row that his wife began to berate him for bringing back neither meat nor money. The fowler answered her patiently each time, telling her that the quails escaped him only because they acted as one, and that the day they began quarreling among themselves, every last one of them would fall into his basket.

Before long, while the flock fed together on the ground, one quail accidentally stepped on the head-feathers of another. The injured bird demanded to know who had trodden on him. When the offender apologized at once, explaining that it had been an accident, the insulted quail refused to let the matter rest. He hurled insults about the other's family and lineage until the dispute spread and the whole flock took sides, trading accusations long after the original misstep had been forgotten.

Recognizing that a flock divided against itself could no longer manage the single coordinated motion their survival depended on, the Bodhisatta gathered his own family and the followers still loyal enough to listen. He led them away to feed in a different valley entirely, leaving the quarreling majority to face the fowler alone.

When the fowler returned and whistled his familiar call, the remaining flock gathered as always, still trading insults even as the net fell over them. Where once they would have lifted it together without a word of disagreement, now one bird shouted that another should lift it first since he boasted of the stronger wings. The other shot back that the first should lift it since he was the one who trod on heads. While they argued instead of acting, the fowler gathered the cords at his leisure, bagged the entire quarreling flock, and carried them off together.

The Buddha concluded by telling the Sakyas and Koliyas that the quarrelsome quail who refused to accept an honest apology and dragged the whole flock into ruin was Devadatta (the Buddha's own cousin, who repeatedly turned against him) in that same past life. The wise quail leader who held the flock together as long as unity was possible, and who withdrew rather than be destroyed by a quarrel he could not end, was the Buddha himself. The two feuding clans, hearing how small a slight had cost an entire flock its freedom, set aside their dispute over the river before it could cost them anything resembling what the quarreling quails had lost.