Seggu Jataka

At Jetavana, a lay follower who had not visited the Buddha for some time finally came, and the Buddha asked him plainly where he had been. The man explained that he had been busy arranging his daughter's marriage, since she was always smiling and he had needed to settle a certain doubt about her before giving her to another family. The Buddha told him that this same doubt, and this same daughter, had already been tested once before in an age long past.

In that former age, during the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as a tree deity dwelling in a great sal tree at the edge of a forest near the city. In Benares lived a greengrocer with a daughter named Seggu, a girl as virtuous as she was pretty, yet known throughout the quarter for laughing easily at the smallest thing. When a family of suitable standing asked for her hand in marriage, her father grew uneasy, wondering whether a girl so quick to laugh could truly carry the modesty her reputation claimed for her.

Determined to know for certain before the marriage was settled, the father took Seggu into the forest on the pretext of gathering herbs and roots. Once deep among the trees, beneath the very sal tree where the Bodhisatta made his unseen home, he took her by the hand and whispered words of passion to her, feigning an improper desire simply to see how she would answer it.

Seggu burst into tears at once, declaring that what he proposed was a monstrous thing, as unnatural as fire somehow rising out of water. She said she had never in her life looked upon any man with anything but a pure and ordinary regard. Her grief was immediate and complete, with nothing rehearsed or performed about it, and it left her father in no doubt at all about the truth of what her laughter had never actually threatened.

The Bodhisatta, dwelling unseen within the sal tree, watched the whole scene unfold from beginning to end without ever revealing himself or speaking a single word. His part in the story was simply to see what passed between father and daughter in that secluded place, carrying the memory of it forward the way only a being untouched by human fear or haste could.

Satisfied at last that his daughter's virtue was exactly what it appeared to be, the father brought her home and gave her in marriage to the family that had asked for her. It was this same relief and gratitude, settled only after so much delay, that had kept him from visiting the Buddha until the whole matter was finally resolved.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the father and daughter now sitting before him were that same father and daughter from the older age. He himself, he said, had been the tree deity who had silently witnessed the entire test beneath his own sal tree. Jataka No. 217 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling. It showed the lay follower that the very doubt which had kept him away so long had already once been settled, by the very same test, in a life neither of them could otherwise have remembered.

The father's unease rested on an assumption the story quietly refuses: that a daughter who laughs so readily must be hiding something beneath the laughter. Seggu's horror in the forest shows that her conscience was entirely clean, whatever doubt her cheerfulness had stirred in her father's mind. It proves that her readiness to smile and her readiness to guard her own virtue had never actually been in tension at all, only in his own imagination.

The Bodhisatta's refusal to step forward and reassure the father in the moment, the way the tree deity in other such tales sometimes does, is itself part of what makes his later testimony to the Buddha so quietly convincing. He had no stake in the outcome and no wish to comfort anyone watching. He simply observed what happened exactly as it happened, which is precisely why his memory of it, carried forward across lifetimes, could later confirm the truth of the test without needing to add anything to it.