Sulasa Jataka

At Jetavana, a servant girl belonging to Anathapindika killed a thief who had tried to murder her for her mistress's ornament, defending herself with sudden and startling cleverness. The Buddha told the household that this same quick wit had already saved her life once before, in an age long past, and told the story of that earlier time.

In that former age, during the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, a renowned courtesan named Sulasa looked down from her palace window and saw a notorious robber named Sattuka being marched to execution. Struck by his handsome bearing even in that condemned state, she fell in love, paid the city's chief constable a thousand pieces to arrange his release, and had Sattuka brought secretly to her house. She gave up her former trade, married him, and lived with him for months in complete devotion.

Watching Sulasa adorned in jewels worth a fortune, Sattuka's old nature reasserted itself, and he began plotting to kill her and take the ornaments for himself rather than remain a kept husband living off a courtesan's wealth. He told her that he had vowed, while being led to his own execution, to make an offering to a mountain deity if his life were spared. He asked her to dress in her finest jewels and climb the mountain with him to keep that vow.

At the summit, Sattuka revealed his true purpose, demanding she strip off her jewels and robes before he threw her into the chasm below. Sulasa pleaded that her wealth and her life already belonged to him and asked only to be spared, but he answered that dead tongues tell no tales and would not be moved.

Seeing that pleading would not save her, Sulasa's own wit rose to meet the danger. She asked for one last request before dying, to circle him three times in farewell and embrace him as her husband one final time. Deceived by her apparent meekness, Sattuka agreed and stood at the cliff's very edge. As she came around behind him on her final circuit, Sulasa shoved him with all her strength, and he fell to his death on the rocks below.

A mountain deity who had witnessed the whole scene spoke verses in praise of her courage, declaring that wisdom is not confined to men alone, since a woman's wit had just proven sharp enough to pierce through deadly peril. The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the servant girl and the thief she had killed were that same Sulasa and Sattuka reborn. He himself, he said, had been the mountain deity who had witnessed her escape and spoken those verses in her honor. Jataka No. 419 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

Sulasa's appeal to Sattuka's affection and her offer to let him keep every jewel both failed completely, which is precisely what makes her final request so striking by comparison. She did not try again to reason with a man who had already decided she was worth more dead than alive. She simply gave him exactly the kind of request a frightened, submissive woman would be expected to make, and let his own assumptions about her do the rest of the work.

The link between the servant girl's sudden violence and Sulasa's calculated push is not that both women were naturally inclined to kill. It is that both possessed the same capacity to think clearly and act decisively in the exact moment when hesitation would have cost them everything. The Buddha's retelling treats that capacity as a genuine virtue in its own right, one that had already proven itself once before and simply needed the same kind of threat to call it forward again.

The mountain deity's declaration that wisdom belongs to women as surely as to men was not offered as a passing compliment but as a correction aimed at whoever might otherwise have assumed Sulasa's survival was luck rather than skill. By naming what she had done as wisdom in the same breath used for any clever man's escape, the verse insisted that her solution be judged on its own merits. It was exactly as sharp and exactly as deserving of honor as any similar feat performed by a man in the same desperate position.