The King Who Kept His Word

At Jetavana, monks spoke admiringly of how the Buddha had converted the murderer Angulimala. The Buddha told them he had already converted this same man once before, in an age long past, and told the story in full.

The Bodhisatta was born Sutasoma, son of King Koravya of Indapatta in the Kuru kingdom. At school he befriended a fellow prince, Brahmadatta of Benares, and when their studies ended, Sutasoma urged all the young princes to keep the holy-day precepts and renounce killing, though he privately sensed danger waiting ahead for Brahmadatta in particular.

Brahmadatta became king of Benares and, after accidentally tasting human flesh in his food, developed a craving for it that his own cook fed by increasingly brutal means, using condemned prisoners, then trapped victims, and finally ordinary citizens snatched from the streets. Terror gripped the city until General Kalahatthi caught the cook and uncovered the king's own part in it.

Rather than punish him outright, Kalahatthi tried to turn the king back through cautionary tales: the fish Ananda who devoured his own tail, a brahmin boy ruined by drink, a landowner's son dead from his addiction to jambu fruit. He told also of golden geese who perished eating their own kind. Brahmadatta would not be moved, and under public pressure Kalahatthi exiled him from the city entirely.

Now earning the name Kammasapada for the spotted marks upon his feet, the exiled king turned to preying on travelers in the forest and capturing neighboring rulers one by one, until he held a hundred captive kings bound among the trees. He vowed to sacrifice them all to a tree spirit in exchange for the healing of a wound. The spirit, unwilling to see such slaughter, resolved instead to send him toward the one man she believed could actually turn him from this path: Sutasoma.

Using power lent by that same spirit, Kammasapada seized Sutasoma while he bathed unguarded in a forest pool. As he was carried off, Sutasoma remembered a promise made to a brahmin named Nanda, to return and hear four verses of the Dhamma that Nanda had prepared for him. Weeping not from fear of death but from the shame of breaking his word, Sutasoma asked leave to keep that appointment first, swearing on his honor to come back afterward. Kammasapada, certain no freed captive would ever return to death willingly, laughed and let him go.

Sutasoma returned to Indapatta and sat with Nanda to hear the four verses: teachings on keeping company with the wise, the impermanence of the body, and the enduring nature of true Dhamma. They had first been taught by the Buddha Kassapa in an age before his own. Moved deeply by them, Sutasoma rewarded the brahmin generously, settled the affairs of his kingdom, and then turned back toward the forest exactly as he had sworn.

Kammasapada could scarcely believe his eyes when his captive walked calmly back into his hands rather than vanishing forever. So moved was he by this fidelity that he offered Sutasoma four boons in return. Sutasoma asked, in turn, for long life for Kammasapada himself, safety for the hundred captured kings, their restoration to their own thrones, and last of all, that Kammasapada give up eating human flesh entirely.

Kammasapada resisted only the final request before yielding to Sutasoma's patient teaching on the perils of falsehood and cruelty and the lasting good of truth. He took up the five precepts, and Sutasoma healed the wounds of the hundred kings through an Act of Truth (a solemn declaration whose own truthfulness was believed to work a change in the world) before leading their reformed captor back to Benares, where Kalahatthi and the court welcomed him home and restored him to his throne. The Buddha closed the teaching by naming Sariputta as Kalahatthi, Ananda as the brahmin Nanda, and Kassapa as the tree spirit. Anuruddha, he said, had been Sakka, his own followers the many freed kings, and Angulimala himself the fearsome Kammasapada. He himself, he revealed, had been Sutasoma all along. Jataka No. 537 of the Pali Canon's Mahanipata records the tale under this telling.

What makes Sutasoma's return so striking is that nothing but his own word compelled it; Kammasapada had no way to enforce the promise once his captive was free. Sutasoma's decision to walk back into captivity rested entirely on an inner standard that no chain or threat was holding in place, which is precisely what left Kammasapada unable to explain what he had just witnessed.