The Upasāḷha Jātaka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana, and the Jātaka Atthakatha records it as Jātaka No. 166, the Upasāḷha Jātaka. It concerns a brahmin named Upasāḷha who was fastidious about cemeteries. He was rich and wealthy and lived across from the monastery, yet he showed no kindness to the Buddhas, for he was given to heresy. But he had a wise and intelligent son.

As he grew old, the brahmin said to his son, "Do not let my body be burnt in a cemetery where any outcast can be burnt. Find some uncontaminated place to burn me in." The son answered that he knew of no cemetery fit for his father's body. "Good father," he said, "take the lead and point out the place yourself, where I shall have you burnt."

The brahmin agreed. He led his son out of the city to the top of Vulture Peak. "Here, my son," he said, "no outcast is ever burnt. Here I would have you burn me." Then he began to go down the hill with his son.

That evening the Master was looking out to see which of his friends was ripe for release. He saw that this father and son were ready to enter the First Path. So he went to the hill's foot and sat there, like a hunter waiting for his quarry, until they came down from the top.

They came down and saw the Master. He greeted them and asked, "Where are you bound, brahmins?" The young man told him their errand. "Come along then," said the Master. "Show me the place your father pointed out."

The three climbed the mountain together. "Which place?" the Master asked. "Sir," said the lad, "the space between these three hills is the one he showed me."

The Master said that this was not the first time the father had been nice in the matter of cemeteries. He had been the same before, and long ago he had pointed out the very same place for his burning. At the brahmin's request, the Master told them a tale of long ago.

Once upon a time, in this very city of Rājagaha, lived this same brahmin Upasāḷha, and he had the very same son. In that period the Bodhisatta had been born in a brahmin family of Magadha. When his education was finished he embraced the religious life, cultivated the faculties and the attainments, and lived a long time in the Himalaya, plunged in mystic exaltation.

Once he left his hermitage on Vulture Peak to buy salt and seasoning. While he was away, the brahmin spoke to his son in just the same way as he did in the present. The lad begged him to point out a proper place, and he pointed out this very place.

As the father was descending with his son, he saw the Bodhisatta and approached him. The Bodhisatta put the same question the Buddha had put, and he received the son's answer. "We shall see," he said, "whether this place that your father has shown you is contaminated or not." He made them go up the hill with him.

"The space between these three hills," said the lad, "is pure."

"My lad," the Bodhisatta replied, "there is no end to the people who have been burned in this very spot. Your own father, born a brahmin as now in Rājagaha, and bearing the very same name of Upasāḷha, has been burnt on this hill in fourteen thousand births. On the whole earth there is not a spot to be found where a corpse has not been burnt, which has not been a cemetery, which has not been covered with skulls."

He knew this by the faculty of recalling all previous lives. Then he spoke two stanzas. The first: "Fourteen thousand Upasāḷhas have been burnt upon this spot, and nowhere in the wide world is there any place where death is not." The second: "Where there are kindness, truth, and justice, temperance and self-control, there no death can find an entrance, and thither goes each saintly soul."

When the Bodhisatta had thus taught father and son, he cultivated the four excellences and went on his way to the Brahma heaven.

At the end of the discourse the Master declared the Truths and identified the birth. At the conclusion of the Truths, father and son were established in the fruit of the First Path. "The father and son were the same then as they are now, and the ascetic was I myself."

The Upasāḷha Jātaka goes straight to the heart of purity by birth. The old brahmin wanted a spot that had never touched an outcast, and the Bodhisatta showed him that no such spot exists, for every part of the earth has been a burial place. The idea that some ground, and some people, are naturally clean and others naturally defiled does not survive the fact of death.

The second stanza names what is deathless. Kindness, truth, justice, temperance, and self-control are not a place but a way of living. The Buddha's teaching on impermanence is gentle here. It does not frighten the old man. It frees him from a worry that could never be solved and lets him see what could.