The Serpent King Who Would Not Strike Back

At Jetavana, the Buddha spoke approvingly of lay followers who kept the uposatha precepts, the special vows of restraint observed on holy days, faithfully. He told his monks that wise men of old had once given up far greater glory than any of them held merely to keep this same vow unbroken. He told the story of an age long past to prove it.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta was born as Duyyodhana, son of the chief consort of the king of Magadha in Rajagaha. Educated at Takkasila, he returned home, and his father installed him on the throne before taking up the ascetic life himself, first in the royal park and later in a leaf hut near Mount Candaka in the Mahimsaka country. There the father mastered deep absorption and the higher knowledges.

As king, Duyyodhana built almshalls at all four city gates and became famous throughout India for his generosity. Yet what he set his heart on was not a human throne forever nor rebirth among the gods, but the glittering realm of the nagas, the serpent deities of popular belief, itself. He kept the moral law and observed the holy days with this one aim in view, and at the end of his life was reborn exactly as he had wished, as Sankhapala, king of the nagas, often called the serpent king for the snake form a naga can take.

Sankhapala soon found little real satisfaction in the very realm he had aspired to. Its sensory pleasures felt hollow to him, and he longed instead for a human rebirth in which he might practice toward final freedom. To keep the uposatha precepts away from every distraction of his underwater palace, he would leave the naga world and take the form of an ordinary serpent. He would then lie motionless on an anthill in the human world, resolved to keep his vow of nonviolence no matter what befell him there.

Sixteen hunters searching for meat came upon him coiled on the anthill and, daunted by his size, drove stakes into his body in eight separate places before packing the open wounds with black bamboo splinters, thorns and all. They threaded cords through the wounds to drag him, and pierced his very nostrils with a slender stake to keep his head raised as they hauled him from village to village as a spectacle. Through every moment of it, Sankhapala never opened his eyes against them nor let anger rise, determined that no wound to his body would become a wound to his vow.

A wealthy landowner named Alara came upon the procession and was moved to free the suffering creature. He gave each of the sixteen hunters a handful of gold coins and an ox of his own, and gave their wives ornaments besides, a ransom generous enough that none of them could refuse it. The moment he was freed, Sankhapala slipped away toward water and vanished.

Grateful beyond measure, Sankhapala later appeared to Alara and led him down into the naga realm, a palace of gold and sapphire surrounded by mango groves. There three hundred naga maidens attended him, and he was granted every heavenly pleasure for a full year. When Alara at last told his host that he wished to become an ascetic rather than remain, Sankhapala let him go freely, laden with everything he would need for the forest life ahead.

Alara took up the ascetic life in the Himalaya region and dwelt there long in solitude before his travels brought him to Benares. The king, struck by his bearing, invited him to the palace, and there, through a dialogue later set down in verse, Alara told the whole story of Sankhapala's capture and endurance. Witnessing such virtue in a being who could have destroyed his tormentors in an instant, he explained, had been what first turned his own heart toward the holy life.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming Kassapa as the father who had become an ascetic, Ananda as the king of Benares who had heard Alara's account, and Sariputta as Alara himself. He himself, he revealed, had been Sankhapala, the naga king whose patience under torture had outlasted both his torment and his own throne. Jataka No. 524 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

Sankhapala's forbearance under the hunters' cruelty was not a sudden feat of willpower summoned in the moment of crisis; it was the direct continuation of a vow he had already resolved to keep long before any hunter found him on that anthill. Lying exposed on open ground, far from the safety of his own underwater realm, was itself a choice he made in order to keep the uposatha without distraction. The entire ordeal that followed was therefore a risk he had already accepted in principle before it ever became real.