Ummadantī Jātaka

Jataka No. 527 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha concerning a monk who, while walking his alms round in Savatthi, caught sight of a strikingly beautiful woman and gave himself up entirely to despair. He needed to be led before the Buddha for admonition. To show him what real mastery over such a glance could look like, the Buddha recalled a former life in which a king had once faced the very same temptation at far greater cost.

In the city of Arittha, the capital of the Sivi kingdom, the Bodhisatta reigned as King Sivi, acclaimed across the earth for his justice, moral rectitude, and strict adherence to the precepts. In that same city lived a wealthy merchant whose daughter, named Ummadanti, was so exquisitely fair that merely beholding her caused men to lose their wits entirely.

Her father wished to present her to the monarch, and the king's brahmin fortune-tellers were sent to judge her auspicious marks. Ummadanti had the brahmins seized by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the house. Stung by this insult, they told the king that the maiden was unfit for him. The king did not send for her, and her father gave her in marriage to the supreme commander of the king's forces, General Abhiparaka.

Ummadanti resented the king's rejection, and the resentment stayed with her after her marriage.

On the full-moon day of the Kattika festival, held in October, the city was decorated and lit with torches, and the king made his ceremonial circuit in a magnificent carriage drawn by thoroughbred horses. Abhiparaka had warned his wife not to show herself to the king, but she had her maid tell her when the procession reached their door. As the king drew near, she appeared at the window and threw flowers down upon him.

The king was struck by her beauty and asked his charioteer, Sunanda, whose house it was. Learning that she was the wife of Abhiparaka, he abandoned the procession and lay down on his couch, lamenting his passion in verse, his mind wholly consumed by her.

Abhiparaka learned of the king's state from the councillors. Standing at the royal door, he heard the king's lament and decided to save him. He hired a cunning servant, hid him inside a hollow tree that served as a shrine, and told him to speak as a yakkha. When Abhiparaka made his offering there, the voice declared that the king was not ill but infatuated with Ummadanti and would die unless he won her. Abhiparaka then went to the king and reported the message as though the yakkha had spoken to him.

The king was ashamed that his secret was known, yet he refused to wrong his friend. Abhiparaka offered to give Ummadanti to him as a gift, but King Sivi answered that he would not commit an unrighteous act even to gain heaven.

Abhiparaka pressed his offer again and again, and each time the king answered in verse with lessons on righteousness, comparing a ruler to the bull that leads the herd and must therefore go straight. He urged that a king must rule justly, so that the law of righteousness might govern monarch and subject alike.

Persuaded by his own teaching, the king gave up his infatuation and kept faith with his friend. In the end the Buddha explained the Four Noble Truths, and the discontented monk attained the first stage of the path.

What finally saved King Sivi was never the absence of temptation, since the temptation struck him with enough force to nearly end his life. It was his refusal to let that feeling make a decision only his own considered judgment had any right to make. The despairing monk in Savatthi needed exactly this reminder. A glance, however overwhelming in the moment it lands, describes nothing permanent about the person who receives it, and even a king brought to the edge of death by desire could still choose, with enough resolve, to let the feeling pass through him rather than rule him.