Ubhobhaṭṭha Jātaka

The Pali Canon's Ubhatobhattha Jataka (J.i.482-4) was told by the Buddha concerning Devadatta, whom the monks were discussing in the Dhamma Hall at the Bamboo Grove: he had left the household life and then fallen short as a monk too, so he had neither the comforts of a householder nor the fruit of the holy life. To show that Devadatta had met such a double failure before, the Buddha recalled a former life in which a fisherman's own cunning had cost him everything in a single morning.

In former days, during the reign of Brahmadatta in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was a tree deity residing in a magnificent forest grove bordering an oxbow lake. Near this lake lived an impoverished, unscrupulous fisherman who had brought his young son along that day to help with the catch.

Casting his line into a deep pool, the fisherman's heavy iron hook caught firmly upon a waterlogged, sunken tree trunk, and the line went taut as though something massive were pulling against it. His greedy mind jumped immediately to a false conclusion: such enormous weight could only mean a monstrous fish. If he pulled it out in front of his son, he reasoned, word would spread and his fishing companions would demand their rightful share of the catch.

The fisherman told his son to hurry home and ask his mother to pick a quarrel with the neighbors, keeping the whole village occupied and distracted. That way no one would notice him slipping away to haul out his prize alone, with no one left to claim a portion of it.

The boy carried the message faithfully, and his mother did exactly as told, staging a quarrel with a neighbour. She dressed up oddly, with a palm leaf behind one ear and soot on one eye, and when the neighbour called her mad she accused the woman of slander and took her to the village headman. The headman found the wife at fault and fined her, and she was tied up and beaten until she paid, all for a disturbance she had started on her husband's orders.

While the fisherman stripped off his clothes and waded into the murky pool to wrestle free his imagined leviathan, a robber crept down to the riverbank. He stole every piece of clothing left behind and vanished before the fisherman ever noticed anything was missing.

Reaching down into the darkness to free what he still believed was a giant fish, the fisherman's face struck the jagged, submerged branches of the sunken tree trunk. The sharp wood tore into both his eyes at once, leaving him completely blinded. He dragged himself onto the muddy bank with nothing in his hands but a rotten log, no clothes to wear, and no sight left to find his own way home.

When he finally staggered home, naked, blind, and bleeding, he found his wife waiting for him just as battered, having lost both her dignity and whatever money the fine had taken from the household. Between them, the two had lost everything the morning had started with and gained nothing at all in return.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the greedy fisherman with Devadatta and the watching tree deity with himself. The man who came to ruin both in the water and on dry land was Devadatta, who had likewise failed on both sides, first as a householder and then as a monk.

What finally cost the fisherman everything was never simple bad luck, but a plan built entirely on the assumption that other people's honest shares were something to be schemed around rather than simply honored. His wife suffered for following his own instructions faithfully, and his son was sent away before he could see what was actually happening. The fisherman himself lost his sight reaching for a fortune that had never existed in the first place, proving that a scheme built to cheat everyone else usually finds a way to cheat its own author worst of all.

The Bodhisatta, dwelling quietly in the branches above the pool, could have called out the moment the fisherman first mistook a snag for a fortune, sparing him the blindness, the theft, and his wife's beating in one simple warning. Instead the tree deity let the entire chain of consequences unfold exactly as the fisherman's own greed had set it in motion. A lesson handed down as a verse after the fact would mean far more to anyone who later heard it than a warning that quietly prevented the fool from ever having to face what his own scheming had actually cost him.