Vatamiga Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha addressed the case of the elder Tissa, also called Cullapindapatika, a young nobleman who had taken ordination and devoted himself to strict ascetic discipline. During a festival, his own parents sent a slave girl to tempt him back with delicious food. She served him dish after delicious dish until, as the text puts it, she had bound him fast in the bonds of a craving for taste. Once that craving had taken hold, she feigned illness to draw him fully back into lay life, and he abandoned his vows. To show the monks that this same vulnerability to taste had already proven fatal to this same man in a far older existence, the Buddha related the Vatamiga Jataka, Jataka No. 14 of the Pali Canon.

In the royal park of King Brahmadatta in Benares, there roamed an extraordinary wild antelope known as the Vatamiga, or wind-deer, so swift that its hooves scarcely seemed to touch the ground. At the faintest scent or sight of a human being, it vanished like a gust of wind, and the king's hunters confessed one after another that no net, pit, or arrow could ever match its speed.

The royal gardener, Sanjaya, came forward and declared that he would bring the wild stag into the palace using nothing more than sweet honey and ordinary grass. Watching where the wind-deer grazed at the edge of the park, Sanjaya smeared honey onto freshly cut blades and left them along the thicket's border, concealing himself from sight. Drawn by the fragrance, the deer nibbled a single blade, and the sweetness it tasted there began to work on its wariness in a way no hunter's trap ever could.

Day after day, Sanjaya laid the honeyed grass a little nearer to himself than the day before. Day after day, the wind-deer's hunger for that one remembered sweetness carried it a little closer to the man it would otherwise never have approached. Little by little, the same creature that had once vanished at a mere glimpse of a human being overcame its entire nature and began feeding directly from Sanjaya's open hand.

At last, Sanjaya laid a trail of honeyed grass leading straight through the open palace gates and into the royal hall itself. The wind-deer followed it blade by blade, utterly absorbed in the taste it had come to crave, blind to the walls closing in around it. The moment it passed the threshold, the guards swung the heavy gates shut, and the once-untouchable creature stood trembling in a stranger's hall, trapped by nothing stronger than its own tongue.

Watching the captured deer shake with a fear no hunter had ever managed to provoke, King Brahmadatta remarked that there is nothing in the world more dangerous to those who dwell in comfort than the craving for taste. It had just accomplished, through patience and honey alone, what every spear and snare in his kingdom had failed to do.

The Buddha concluded by identifying the figures in the tale for the monks troubled by Tissa's fall. The slave girl who had served him dish after tempting dish, he said, had been the gardener Sanjaya in that distant life. Tissa himself had been the wind-deer, untouchable by every ordinary danger yet undone entirely by what it wanted to taste. The king who watched the capture and drew its lesson aloud had been the Buddha himself.

The wind-deer's defining trait, the speed that made it legendary throughout the kingdom, turns out to be entirely irrelevant to how it was actually caught. No hunter outran it, and no trap outmaneuvered it; the one thing capable of closing the distance between the deer and captivity was the deer's own returning hunger for a taste it had chosen, on its own, to sample a second time. The jataka's quiet warning is that whatever makes a being hardest to catch by force may do nothing at all to protect it from what it is willing to walk toward on its own.

Sanjaya never seized the deer, chased it, or forced it through the gates. Every single step of its approach was the deer's own choice, freely taken toward a pleasure it had already decided it wanted more of. This is precisely what makes the jataka's comparison to Tissa so exact. No one dragged him back to lay life against his will; a craving he indulged once simply grew large enough, step by willing step, to walk him back through a gate he had meant never to pass through again.