Takkariya Jataka

At Jetavana, the monks spoke of how the monk Cula Kokalika had repeatedly slandered Sariputta and Moggallana after they refused to indulge his greed, and was driven out by the townspeople for it. He continued his abuse even before the Buddha himself, and died covered in bloody boils, reborn into hell by his own words. The Buddha told them that this same man had once destroyed himself in exactly this way before, and told the story of an age long past.

In that former age, the king's own chaplain, a man toothless and tawny-brown in complexion, discovered that his wife had taken a lover who happened to resemble him almost exactly in appearance. Unable to touch the lover directly, he devised a plot. He told the king that the city's collapsed southern gate could only be rebuilt safely with the sacrifice of a brahmin matching a very particular description, toothless and tawny-skinned, buried beneath its central post.

Pleased to have found a scheme that would let him destroy his rival under cover of royal duty, the chaplain could not resist telling his wife what he had arranged. She immediately warned her lover to flee, and the warning spread so widely that every toothless, tawny-skinned brahmin in the city disappeared within days, leaving the king's men with no victim to find.

Searching in vain for anyone else matching the description, the king's officers eventually realized that no one in the entire city fit it so precisely as the chaplain himself. His own pupil, the young brahmin Takkariya, was offered his master's position as chaplain, while the old chaplain himself was led away to the pit he had designed for another man entirely.

As they walked toward the execution ground, Takkariya told his condemned master five stories in turn. He told of the gambler Tundila, whose ruin at dice left a stranger walking home ashamed and bare rather than see his sister's heart soften. He told of a bird crushed between two fighting rams it had tried to separate, and of four men who died striking their heads together while catching a falling man in a stretched cloth. He told also of a goat that, left briefly unwatched by thieves without a knife, kicked loose the very blade that was later used to kill it. And he told of two Kinnara spirits (mythical beings, half-human and half-bird) whose silence nearly cost them their lives before a timely word finally saved them.

Each story carried the same warning in a different shape: careless words and careless actions return upon the one who sets them loose. The chaplain, walking toward the very grave his own scheme had dug, needed no further explanation of how precisely his own tongue had brought him there.

Rather than let the sentence proceed, Takkariya announced that the proper hour for the sacrifice had not yet come and that it must wait until the dead of night. Under cover of that delay, he secretly freed his old master and sent him away unharmed, then had a dead goat buried beneath the gatepost in his place, satisfying the king's decree without a single human life lost.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the chaplain who had tried to engineer another man's death through a lie had been Cula Kokalika in that earlier age, exactly as he was now. He himself, he said, had been Takkariya, the pupil whose patient stories and quiet mercy had spared even the master who had so nearly doomed an innocent man to die in his place. Jataka No. 481 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

Nothing about the chaplain's scheme failed because Takkariya intervened early or because the king grew suspicious; it collapsed entirely from the chaplain's own inability to keep his own secret from his own wife. The very words he used to set the trap were the words that, passed from his wife to her lover and outward through the city, eventually closed the trap on no one but himself.

Takkariya's decision to save his master's life does not undo anything the stories had already made plain about the danger of loose speech. It simply shows that recognizing a truth about oneself, however painfully learned, need not end in death when someone willing to show mercy stands close enough to offer it.