Samugga Jātaka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana to a monk who was troubled by worldly craving for a woman. When the Buddha asked whether this was true and the monk admitted it, the Buddha explained that desire cannot be mastered through force or confinement, and illustrated the point with No. 436 of the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā, the Samugga Jātaka, a tale of a demon who learned that lesson the hard way.

In the days of King Brahmadatta of Benares, the Bodhisatta renounced the world and became an ascetic, settling in a quiet valley of the Himalayas, where he lived in deep meditation, undisturbed by the affairs of ordinary life.

Nearby in that same forest dwelt an Asura, a powerful demon who preyed on travelers along the forest roads but who also, from time to time, visited the hermit to listen to his teaching, for even a demon could recognize wisdom when he heard it.

One day a noblewoman of Kāsi was traveling with her escort to visit her parents when the Asura scattered her guards and abducted her. Struck by her beauty, he kept her in comfort and luxury, yet feared above all that she might escape or be unfaithful to him.

To guard her completely, the Asura devised an extraordinary method: he placed her inside a splendid jeweled casket, the samugga, and whenever he had to leave her, he swallowed the casket whole into his own belly, believing that nothing could then reach her.

One day, while the Asura allowed her out to bathe in a forest pool, the woman noticed a magician flying overhead, a son of Vāyu (the Vedic god of wind), carrying a sword. She signaled to him, and he came down to her.

Knowing the demon would soon return, the woman concealed the magician inside the casket with her, covering him with her garment, and when the Asura came back and swallowed the casket again as always, he had no idea that he now carried two people, not one, inside himself.

Pleased with his clever precaution, the Asura went, as he sometimes did, to visit the hermit in his forest dwelling, confident that his wife remained safely locked away exactly where he had left her.

Seeing the demon approach, the Bodhisatta, who perceived the truth with his spiritual sight, greeted him warmly: "Whence come ye, friends? Right welcome all the three! Be pleased to rest with me awhile, I pray." The Asura, puzzled, asked why the hermit spoke of three when he had come alone. The Bodhisatta answered plainly: "Thyself and thy dear wife are twain, be sure; enclosed within a box she lies secure, safe-guarded ever in thy belly, she with Vāyu's son doth sport her merrily."

Alarmed, the Asura vomited up the casket at once and tore it open. The magician, drawing his sword and casting a spell, flew up into the sky and escaped, while the woman stepped out as well. The demon, shaken, thanked the hermit for revealing the truth that had been hidden inside his own body.

The Asura lamented aloud that no confinement, however total, could guarantee a heart's fidelity against its own will, and resolved that true peace would never be found in such possessive grasping. Following the Bodhisatta's counsel, he released the woman unharmed, undertook to observe the five moral precepts, and withdrew from his old violent ways in the forest.

At the end of the tale, the Buddha revealed that the ascetic of clear sight in that old story had been himself. Hearing the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha's core teaching on suffering and its end, explained through this teaching, the troubled monk to whom the tale was first told attained the fruit of the first stage of the path.

The Samugga Jātaka endures as one of the canon's most vivid teachings on the futility of trying to control desire by physical force rather than by inward restraint: a casket within a belly within a forest could not hold what only discipline and understanding can truly guard.