The Golden Goose and the Greedy Mother

In the past, when King Brahmadatta reigned in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was born into a respected Brahmin family. He grew to manhood, married, and fathered three daughters—Nandā, Nandavatī, and Sundarī-Nandā. He lived out his years as an upright and devoted householder. When he died, the merit of his blameless life bore fruit: he was reborn as a magnificent golden swan, the Suvaṇṇahaṃsa, with wings of solid gold and the power to recall his past existences.

Looking down from the sky with his divine sight, the golden swan searched for the family he had left behind, and he found them destitute. Without a husband and father to provide for them, his widow and three daughters had been reduced to hired labor, husking grain and grinding corn in other people's houses for a bare subsistence, dressed in little better than rags.

Pity for his former family filled the swan's heart. He thought: "My wife and daughters are suffering grievously for want of means. My body is covered in pure gold feathers. If I give them one feather now and again, they can sell it and want for nothing." Resolved, he flew to his old home and alighted on the roof beam.

At the sight of the radiant bird, the women were astonished. Speaking in a gentle human voice, the swan said: "Do not be afraid. I am your husband and father, reborn as you see me now." He told them he had come back because he could not bear their suffering. He let fall one lustrous golden feather and told them to sell it in the market, promising to return with another whenever they were in need.

True to his word, the golden swan came back again and again, each time leaving behind a single feather of pure gold. With this steady wealth, the mother and her three daughters built a sound house, dressed well, and ate their fill. For a time, the family's long suffering was over.

Prosperity did not satisfy the mother; it only fed her greed. One day she said to her daughters that a bird's mind could not be trusted, for who knew when their father would fly off to some distant country and never return. "Let us catch him next time," she said, "and take every feather he has." Her three daughters were horrified. "Mother," they protested, "he rescued us from ruin, and we already have all that we need. Do not harm him."

The mother would not listen. When the golden swan next landed in the courtyard, trusting her as before, she seized him with both hands and dragged him inside. She tore out every one of his feathers by force, ignoring his cries of pain. But the instant each golden quill was wrenched from his body, it lost its splendor. The feathers that fell into her hands were no longer gold but coarse and worthless, like the dull feathers of a crane.

Disgusted and disappointed, the mother threw the plucked, bleeding bird into an old grain basket. His compassionate daughters nursed his wounds and fed him in secret until, in time, new feathers grew in. But the plumage that came back was common white feather, without a trace of gold. As soon as his wings could bear him again, the swan rose into the sky, set his course for the Himalayas, and never returned to that house again.

This Jātaka No. 136 is preserved in the Khuddaka Nikāya (a division of the Pāli Canon's discourses) in the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā, the Pāli Canon's commentarial collection of birth-stories. The Buddha told it to the assembled monks when the nun Thullanandā took far more garlic than she had been allotted from a lay supporter's field, and the bailiff's complaint about greedy nuns reached the Buddha. In the Samodhāna, the concluding identification that closes every Jātaka, he revealed who the actors of the old story had become. The covetous mother, he said, was an earlier existence of the nun Thullanandā, the very nun whose greed for garlic had prompted the Buddha to tell the story. Her three virtuous daughters, he said, were reborn as three of Thullanandā's own sisters in the monastic order.

Through this tale, the Buddha taught one of the central principles of his doctrine: santuṭṭhi, contentment, which he elsewhere declared to be the highest wealth a person can possess—santuṭṭhī paramaṃ dhanaṃ. The swan's feathers, given freely out of love, could have sustained the family indefinitely. The same feathers, seized by force out of fear and greed, turned worthless the instant they were torn away. What is taken through violence and impatience, the Jātaka teaches, loses the very value that made it worth taking in the first place.