Tiṇḍuka Jātaka

The Pali Canon's Tinduka Jataka, recorded in the Jataka commentary J.ii (76), was told by the Buddha in illustration of the Bodhisatta's own sagacity. It recalled a former life in which quick thinking under the shadow of certain death had once saved an entire troop of monkeys from annihilation.

In days of old, when King Brahmadatta reigned in the majestic city of Benares, the Bodhisatta came into being as a magnificent leader of monkeys, colossal in strength, fearless in danger, and endowed with lightning intellect. He ruled sovereignly over a vast forest troop numbering eighty thousand monkeys upon the lush northern slopes of the Himalayas.

Deep in that region, close to the edge of an agricultural village, stood a gigantic wild persimmon tree whose towering branches spread wide like a green canopy. During the autumn season, it hung heavy with thousands of luscious, golden-sweet fruits whose fragrant perfume drifted on the wind for miles around. Because the tree stood right inside the perimeter of human dwellings, the Bodhisatta had strictly forbidden his followers from approaching it during daylight, knowing the murderous wrath of men armed with bows and slings.

When midnight fell and the village was wrapped in deep slumber, the Bodhisatta gave the signal. The eighty thousand monkeys descended silently like shadow phantoms, leapt onto the heavy boughs, and began gorging themselves upon the succulent, honey-sweet persimmons, confident that darkness would keep them hidden until they finished.

A villager, awakened by the creaking of overloaded branches, peered outside into the moonlight and saw the canopy alive with thousands of feasting monkeys. He immediately raised a frantic outcry throughout the settlement. In moments, hundreds of furious villagers rushed out bearing blazing torches, strung bows, barbed spears, and iron clubs, ringing the giant tree completely in an unbroken circle three rows deep.

The headman commanded that no one fire an arrow into the dark, instructing the men to stand guard until the sun rose, when they would shoot every thieving monkey from the branches like rain. Hearing the lethal doom awaiting them at first light, the eighty thousand monkeys were paralyzed with terror, clinging to the trunk and weeping. They wailed around their king that there was no gap left anywhere in the hunters' ring of spears.

The Bodhisatta stood undaunted and told his people plainly that despair destroys courage before the arrow ever strikes, and that a leader must never surrender to panic while breath still remains. He told them to keep eating while fruit remained, and when he called the troop together he found that his own nephew Senaka, a nimble, fearless young monkey, was missing. "If Senaka is not here," he told them, "there is no need to fear; he will find a way to help us."

Senaka had overslept and woken to find the troop gone. Following their tracks, he saw the villagers hurrying toward the tree, and on his own initiative he saw his chance: an old woman lay asleep beside a fire in a hut at the village's edge. Pretending to be a village child setting off for the fields, he took a burning brand, stood upwind, and set the village alight. In moments a roaring blaze rose into the midnight sky for every villager to see.

Seeing what looked like their own homes ablaze, the villagers screamed in horror and dropped their bows, spears, and torches. Their encirclement broke entirely as the whole throng dashed madly toward the burning village to fetch water and douse the blaze before it could spread any further.

The instant the cordon dissolved, the Bodhisatta gave the commanding cry for his followers to leap for the mountains. The eighty thousand monkeys bounded across the rooftops, leapt over the garden fences, and vanished like a swift wind into the safety of the dark mountain forests. Not one of them was lost to the arrows that had been waiting for them at dawn.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the quick-thinking nephew Senaka with Mahanama the Sakiyan (a kinsman of the Buddha from the Sakyan clan), his followers with the monkey troop, and himself with the monkey chief. The same resourcefulness which had once lit a single, decisive fire to save eighty thousand lives was a gift Mahanama had already been carrying, in some form, since long before this present existence.

What finally saved the troop was never brute strength, since eighty thousand monkeys clinging to one tree trunk had no way to fight past a triple ring of armed men waiting calmly for daylight. It was a single clear thought, arriving at the exact moment panic threatened to make clear thought impossible. That one thought, the nephew's own, turned a sleeping hut and a burning brand into the one tool capable of breaking a circle no amount of courage alone could have broken. A leader's steadiness in the worst moment, refusing to let fear decide anything before a plan had even been tried, was itself what kept eighty thousand lives alive long enough for that plan to work.