Surāpāna Jātaka

Jataka No. 81 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning the occasion on which the monk Sagata became drunk in public. In the Vinaya account, Sagata had earned honor for subduing a fierce serpent, yet when villagers offered him strong drink he accepted it and was carried out helpless. The Buddha answered this disgrace with an old story of five hundred ascetics who had once learned the same lesson the hard way.

In that former life, the Bodhisatta led a community of five hundred ascetics in the Himalayas. Each of them had reached real meditative attainment through years of strict moral practice in their mountain huts.

When the rains came, the disciples asked leave to travel to inhabited country for salt and seasoning. The Bodhisatta stayed behind in the Himalayas, and the five hundred went on alone to Benares, where they settled in the king's own pleasure park. They quickly impressed King Brahmadatta with their dignified, unshaken calm. The king admired their austerity so much that he had them fed at the palace for four months, and the ascetics, grateful and at ease, saw no reason to suspect that anything in the city could do them harm.

A drinking festival came round in the city. Wishing to honor his holy guests, the king had a generous supply of fine spirits sent to the hermits as a gift, never suspecting what such generosity would actually cost them.

Far from their teacher's side, the five hundred disciples drank deeply of the liquor, and their hard-won mindfulness drowned entirely beneath it.

In their drunkenness the ascetics danced and sang and scattered their belongings about, before falling asleep where they were. Years of careful practice had been reduced in a single evening to spectacle.

When the disciples woke and saw the disorder around them, they felt the full weight of what they had done, and told one another they had done wrong in being away from their master. They returned to the Himalayas and confessed everything to the Bodhisatta.

The disciples themselves spoke the verse that names it: they had drunk, they had danced, they had sung, they had wept, and so senseless were they from drink that they were not even found to be monkeys. The Bodhisatta did not answer with fury. He rebuked them for not living under a master's care and told them never to do such a thing again. Then, remaining himself in unbroken absorption, he was destined for rebirth in the Brahma realm.

Thoroughly humbled, the five hundred ascetics remained with their teacher in the Himalayas, bound by his instruction never to repeat the act, while their teacher kept to his practice. They carried with them a lesson no amount of prior discipline had been enough to teach them until they had actually lived through its failure.

What the story preserves is never a simple prohibition. It was a plain warning about how quickly even years of discipline can be undone by a single substance that removes the very faculty, mindfulness itself, that discipline depends on to notice anything going wrong before it already has.

The pupils' own words make the point: on waking, their first thought was that they had gone wrong by being away from their master. Five hundred ascetics together, every one of them drinking, found no single voice among them sober enough to stop the evening or to name it clearly afterward. The Bodhisatta's rebuke was therefore not only about the drink but about the shelter of a teacher's guidance, which they had left behind and to which they now returned.