The Prince Who Would Not Look Away

At Jetavana, the Buddha taught his monks how mindfulness of the body should feel. He asked them to imagine a man forced to carry a bowl brimful of oil through a great crowd gathered to watch a beautiful woman sing and dance. A swordsman walked behind him, ready to strike off his head the instant a single drop spilled. Such a man, he said, would keep his whole mind fixed on the oil and never once glance toward the dancer, and this same unbroken attention to the body was what every monk should cultivate. He then told the story of a prince who had once needed exactly this kind of attention to survive.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta was the youngest of a hundred sons born to a king of Benares. Wondering whether he would ever inherit a throne, he asked a group of wandering Paccekabuddhas (ascetics who had each attained enlightenment alone, without founding a teaching order) about his future. They told him plainly that he would never rule his own city, but that he could become king of distant Takkasila, a city far across the land, if he could reach it alive within seven days, traveling a road known to be haunted by man-eating ogresses. Before he set out, they gave him a charmed thread to wear and a measure of charmed sand for his protection.

The prince set out with five companions, and the ogresses along the road worked exactly as feared. One by one, each companion was drawn aside by a different lure: the sight of unearthly beauty, the sound of enchanting music, an irresistible fragrance, a feast too tempting to pass, or simply a bed too comfortable to leave. Each one who paused to indulge was seized and devoured before he ever caught up again.

One cunning ogress attached herself to the prince alone, posing as his own wife and telling everyone they passed along the way that the two of them were husband and wife traveling together. She hoped to slip past his guard through sheer familiarity rather than open seduction. Protected by the charmed thread and sand, the prince never let her closeness break his attention, and he reached Takkasila with his life and his resolve both intact.

Unable to enter the rest house where the protected prince stayed, the ogress instead appeared at the city gates in a form of such dazzling beauty that the king of Takkasila fell for her at once. He brought her into the palace as his own queen. Once installed, she told him she feared mockery from the rest of the harem over her unknown origins, and asked for authority over the entire palace to protect herself from it. Infatuated, the king granted her everything she asked.

With that authority secured, the ogress summoned her own kind into the palace by night. Together they killed the king and devoured every living creature within its walls, leaving not even a dog or a fowl alive by morning.

When the people of Takkasila broke into the silent palace and found it littered with bones, they remembered that the prince alone had seen through the woman from the very beginning and had tried to warn them. They recognized in him the wisdom and steadfastness that had already saved his own life on the road. The courtiers and citizens together chose him as their new king, and he ruled Takkasila long and righteously from that day on. The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that the courtiers who had died in that massacre had been his own disciples in an earlier life. He himself, he said, had been the prince whose unwavering attention had carried him safely through every lure the road and the palace could offer. Jataka No. 96 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

What makes the ogresses' campaign so effective against the prince's companions is that no two of them failed to the same temptation; beauty caught one, music another, food a third, each man undone by whatever he personally found hardest to resist. The prince's charm and discipline protected him not by blinding him to any one specific lure but by holding his attention steady regardless of which form the danger happened to take. That is exactly the quality the Buddha asked his monks to cultivate in the oil-bowl parable that opened the teaching.