The Sigāla Jātaka

The Buddha told this story while staying in his gabled chamber at Mahāvana near Vesāli, and the Jātaka Atthakatha records it as Jātaka No. 152, the Sigāla Jātaka. It concerns a barber of Vesāli who served the royal household. He shaved and dressed the hair of kings and queens, princes and princesses, and he was a true believer who kept the Three Refuges (taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha) and the Five Precepts. From time to time he listened to the Master's teaching.

One day the barber went to the palace to work and took his son with him. The young man saw a Licchavi girl, richly dressed like a nymph, and fell in love with her. As they left the palace he said to his father, "There is a girl. If I get her, I shall live. If I do not, there is nothing but death for me."

The boy refused all food and lay clinging to his bed. His father said that he should not set his heart on forbidden fruit. The Licchavi girl was a highborn lady and the son was a barber's son, so they were no match. His father promised to find him a girl of his own place and station. The boy would not listen. His mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, kinsfolk, and friends all tried to calm him, and none could. He wasted away and died.

The father performed the funeral rites. When the first edge of his grief had worn off, he took a large gift of flowers and perfumes and went to the Master. He saluted him and sat to one side. "Why have you kept out of sight so long, layman?" the Buddha asked. The barber told him what had happened.

The Master answered that this was not the first time the young man had perished by setting his heart on what he could not have. At the layman's request, he told a story of the olden time.

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisatta came into the world as a young lion in the region of the Himalaya. He had younger brothers and one sister, and they all lived in a Golden Cave. Near that cave stood a Crystal Cave on a silver hill, and a jackal lived in it.

When the lions' parents died, the brothers used to leave their sister in the cave and go out to find food. They brought it back for her to eat.

The jackal had seen the young lioness and fallen in love with her. While her parents lived he could find no way to approach, but once the seven brothers went out to look for food, he came from his Crystal Cave to the Golden Cave. Standing before her, he spoke cunningly. He was a four-footed creature, he said, and so was she, so she should be his mate and he would be her husband.

The lioness thought that this jackal was mean among beasts and low like a man of low caste, while she was esteemed to be of royal blood. That he should speak to her so was unseemly. She would hold her breath until she died. Then she reflected that dying so would not be fitting. Her brothers would soon be home, and she would tell them first.

One of the young lions came back with a share of food and offered it to her. She refused, saying that she must die. When he asked why, she told him what the jackal had said. He asked where the jackal was. She saw the jackal lying in the Crystal Cave and, thinking he was up in the sky, she said, "Can you not see him on Silver Mountain, lying up in the sky?"

The lion, not knowing the jackal lay inside a Crystal Cave, sprang to kill him and struck the crystal. His heart burst, and he died at the foot of the mountain. The same thing happened to five more brothers in turn, each of whom heard the same account and made the same leap.

Last of all the Bodhisatta came in. When he heard her story, he asked where the jackal was. "Up in the sky, above Silver Mountain," she said. He thought, "Jackals lying in the sky? Nonsense. He must be lying in a Crystal Cave."

He went to the foot of the mountain and found his six brothers lying dead. He understood what had happened. They had been foolish and lacked the fullness of wisdom, he thought, and had beaten out their hearts against the crystal. Then he spoke a verse. Whoever rashly undertakes an enterprise without counting the issue that may arise, like one who burns his mouth in eating food, falls victim to his own plan.

The Bodhisatta added that his brothers had wanted to kill the jackal but had not known how to lay their plans cleverly. He would not leap as they had. He would let the jackal's own fear do the work. He found the path by which the jackal went up and down, turned that way, and roared the lion's roar three times, so that earth and heaven were one great roaring.

The jackal, lying in the Crystal Cave, was frightened and astounded, and his heart burst. The Buddha spoke the second verse, in which the lion roars on Mount Daddara, another name for the same silver hill where the jackal's Crystal Cave stood, and the jackal living nearby bursts his heart for fear at the sound.

The Bodhisatta laid his brothers together in one grave. He told his sister that they were dead and comforted her. He lived out the rest of his life in the Golden Cave until he passed away to the place his merits had earned.

When the discourse was over, the Master revealed the Four Noble Truths and identified the birth. At the end of the teaching the layman reached the First Path, the initial stage of awakening. "The barber's son of today was then the jackal. The Licchavi girl was the young lioness. The six younger lions are now six Elders, and I myself am the eldest lion."

The Sigāla Jātaka warns about two kinds of blindness. One is the longing that fixes on what it cannot have and cannot be talked out of it, even by a whole family. The other is the haste of the brothers, who reacted to what they were told without looking at what was in front of them.

The Bodhisatta's answer is quiet. He stopped, examined the mountain, and understood before acting. A devotee who feels the pull of a strong desire, or the push of a strong anger, can learn from the eldest lion to pause until the situation is seen as it is.