Ucchaṅga Jātaka

Jataka No. 67 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha in reference to a woman in a village in Kosala. She obtained the release of three men from the king of Kosala after they had been seized on suspicion of robbery. The monks praised her, and the Buddha recalled that she had once before saved the same three men by the same wisdom, in a life under King Brahmadatta of Benares.

Three men were ploughing at the edge of a forest. Robbers had just plundered some travellers there and escaped, and the victims, searching in vain for the thieves, came upon the three ploughmen, decided they must be the robbers in disguise, and dragged them before the king of Kosala.

Brought before the king as suspected robbers, the three ploughmen were held as prisoners, their fate resting on the accusation of the men who had been robbed. The three were in fact kin of a single woman, though the king did not yet know it.

A woman kept coming to the palace, crying out that she needed something to cover her. The king sent her a garment, but she refused it, saying that what she meant was a husband. Questioned by the king, she explained that a husband is a woman's true covering, and that a woman without one is bare, however fine her clothes.

Pleased with her answer, the king asked how the three prisoners were related to her. She said that one was her husband, one her brother, and one her son. The king told her that he would spare one of the three, and asked her plainly which one she would choose to save.

Wiping her tears, the woman bowed low and explained the reasoning behind the choice she was about to make, rather than simply naming a name and leaving the king to wonder why. As long as she lived, she said, she could marry again and find another husband, and from that husband she could bear another son to hold in her lap.

But her mother and father, she continued, were already dead, and no other womb could ever bear her another brother in this life. A husband or a son, however painful to lose, could in some sense be replaced by the years still ahead of her, while a brother, once gone, was gone for a reason nothing in her future could change.

For this reason, she asked the king to grant her the life of her brother specifically. It was not because she loved him more than her husband or son, but because his was the one loss that time itself could never make good.

The king was impressed by her clear, carefully reasoned discernment and by her loyalty to the family she had been born into as well as the one she had married into. He freed all three men, so that one woman's words saved three lives.

The Buddha told that the same thing had happened in the past, when Brahmadatta ruled at Benares and the Bodhisatta was that king. Three men ploughing at a forest's edge were seized and brought before him, and a woman pleaded for them. Asked whom she wanted, she first asked for all three, and the king refused. She then asked for her brother, and the king offered her the husband or the son instead. She answered in a verse that she could bring a son to her lap and find a husband on the road, but could find no country from which to bring back a brother. The king approved, had the three released, and gave them to her.

In both lives the woman and the three men were the same people, and the Bodhisatta was the king. Her answer drew a distinction between losses that can, with time, be partly replaced, and the one loss that cannot, and it was the clarity of that distinction that saved all three of the men she loved rather than only the one she had been permitted to name.