Tuṇḍila Jātaka

Jataka No. 388 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning a monk who lived in constant terror of the thought of death. It recalled a former life in which a young pig facing the exact same terror had been comforted by his elder brother's teaching on virtue and fearlessness.

In ancient times, when King Brahmadatta ruled Varanasi, an old village woman reared two orphaned piglets as though they were her own foster children, naming the elder Maha-Tundila and the younger Culla-Tundila. The Bodhisatta was Maha-Tundila. Both pigs grew extraordinarily sleek, handsome, and endowed with gentle and moral dispositions, roaming freely and returning faithfully to their loving foster mother.

One festive season, a gang of riotous drunkards ran out of meat to accompany their spirits, and learning of the plump pigs kept by the old woman, they offered her heavy bags of gold coins. Weakened by age and poverty, the woman succumbed to the temptation, and prepared a lavish trough of rich rice gruel and perfumed water, hoping to fatten and entice the brothers into the pen for slaughter.

Sensing the ominous clatter of butchers' cleavers and smelling the wine, young Culla-Tundila was gripped by paralyzing terror. Trembling and weeping, he ran to his elder brother, crying that this feast being prepared for them was not love but the knife in disguise, and asking where they could possibly flee from such a death.

Maha-Tundila remained majestic, serene, and radiant with supreme mindfulness. Looking upon his brother with infinite tenderness, he spoke gently, explaining that for creatures born with mortal flesh, death is an inevitable debt to nature. Those who fatten their bodies without cultivating their minds live in perpetual dread, while those who guard their virtue and dwell in harmlessness find that death holds no sting at all.

He urged his brother to cleanse his heart of hatred, bathe in the cool stream of loving-kindness, and observe the moral precepts with steadfast resolve. No amount of fear could change what was coming, but a settled mind could still choose how to meet it. As Maha-Tundila preached on the impermanence of all living things and the deep peace of moral purity, his voice resounded like a bell throughout the surrounding streets.

The drunkards dropped their knives in awe at what they were hearing, and the old woman wept in repentant shame at what her own poverty had nearly let happen. All of Varanasi heard of the Bodhisatta's preaching and flocked to the spot to listen for themselves, until King Brahmadatta himself arrived with his ministers and sat down on the ground to hear the teaching in full.

Moved by what he heard, the king adopted both Maha-Tundila and Culla-Tundila as his own sons, ending the danger that had driven the younger brother to tears in the first place. He raised Maha-Tundila to a position of judicial authority within the court, trusting his evident wisdom to help settle disputes fairly among the people of the kingdom.

When the king eventually died, Maha-Tundila drew on everything he had learned in that role to compose legal writings meant to guide those who would judge after him. He left behind a record of fairness that served the kingdom long after the pig who first offered it had also passed from the scene.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the fearful monk with Culla-Tundila and himself with Maha-Tundila. The same steady teaching which had once calmed a terrified young pig facing slaughter was exactly the medicine still needed centuries later by a monk who could not stop dwelling on his own eventual death.

What finally disarmed the drunkards was never an argument against killing pigs specifically. It was a demonstration that fear of death and freedom from that fear are both learned postures, available to any creature willing to examine its own mind honestly rather than simply reacting to danger. Culla-Tundila's terror was entirely reasonable given what he smelled and heard, and his brother never pretended otherwise. He simply showed, by his own example, that virtue cultivated in advance leaves a mind steady enough to meet even a knife without being ruled by it.