Susīma Jātaka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana after the people of Sāvatthi had gathered offerings and debated whether to give them to the followers of rival teachers or to the Buddha's own disciples. When the vote favored the Buddha, the offerings were given lavishly for seven days, and the monks marveled afterward at how the Buddha had prevailed despite the heretics' efforts to turn the people away. The Buddha told them that this was not the first time such interference had failed, and he recounted a birth long past.

In ancient Benares, a king named Susīma once ruled, and the Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be, in an earlier life) was born as the only son of the royal chaplain's wife. The chaplain's family held an ancient hereditary right to conduct the king's great elephant festival, a ceremony that earned ten million pieces each time it was performed.

When the Bodhisatta was sixteen, his father died, and rival brahmins at court saw their chance. As the next elephant festival approached, they convinced King Susīma that the chaplain's young son lacked the learning needed to conduct so sacred a rite, and the king set the boy's inheritance aside. The Bodhisatta's mother despaired at the loss of both her husband and her family's ancient office.

The Bodhisatta would not accept the loss quietly. He announced to his grieving mother that he would travel the two thousand leagues (a traditional unit of distance) to Takkasilā, the renowned seat of learning. There he would master the three Vedas and the whole lore of elephant festivals, however long it was said to take, in time to return for the ceremony.

The Bodhisatta reached Takkasilā in a single day's journey and presented himself to the most famous teacher in the city, paying a thousand pieces for his instruction. Through a sharpness of mind beyond ordinary students, he mastered in one night everything that was normally taught over twelve long years, and in the course of his study he even corrected points his own teacher had gotten wrong.

Returning to Benares in time for the festival, the Bodhisatta presented himself before King Susīma and laid claim to his father's hereditary office. The king, once he saw the young man's command of the three Vedas and the elephant lore in full, acknowledged that the ancestral right was his by law and by learning alike.

The brahmins who had schemed to take the office for themselves were brought forward to test their own knowledge against his, and not one of them could equal what the Bodhisatta had mastered in a single night at Takkasilā. Seeing this, the king restored him fully to his father's place without further argument.

The Bodhisatta conducted the great elephant festival exactly as his family had always done, performing every rite with precision and winning the king's open admiration. He returned home with the ten million pieces that were the office's traditional due, restoring his mother's household to the security it had enjoyed in his father's lifetime.

At the end of the teaching, the Buddha identified the figures in the tale for the monks of Jetavana. Mahāmāyā, his own mother, had been the Bodhisatta's mother in that birth. King Suddhodana, his father, had been the Bodhisatta's father. Ānanda had been King Susīma, after whom the jataka is named, though the king himself plays only a supporting part. Sāriputta had been the renowned teacher at Takkasilā. The Buddha himself, in that distant life, had been the young brahmin who traveled two thousand leagues to reclaim what rivals had tried to take from his mother.

The jataka endures as a reminder that an inheritance threatened by envy and slander is not always lost, provided the one who stands to lose it is willing to match any accusation with real, demonstrated mastery rather than mere protest. It is also a quiet lesson in how these tales are named. The jataka bears the title of King Susīma, a minor figure in the plot, while its true hero, the diligent and unnamed young brahmin who becomes the Buddha, is remembered only by his deeds rather than by any personal name the texts preserve.