Vighāsa Jātaka

Jataka No. 393 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha while he was staying at the East Garden (Pubbarama), concerning monks who had grown absorbed in amusements. The Venerable Moggallana had shaken their dwelling to startle them (the event recalled in the Pasadakampana Sutta), and the monks discussed it in the Dhamma Hall. The Buddha told them that this was not the first time they had been drawn to amusement, and recalled a former life in which seven brothers had traded genuine renunciation for easier pleasures.

Once, seven brothers from a village in Kasi, the ancient region around Benares, renounced the world together and took up the ascetic life in the forest of Mejjharanna. They left behind homes, family, and property to pursue a path of austerity and meditation side by side.

Rather than keeping to the austere practice they had set out to follow, the seven brothers gradually gave themselves up to various amusements. They drifted away from meditation and contemplation toward easier, more pleasant ways of passing their days in the forest.

Sakka, the king of the gods, who was the Bodhisatta in that age, wished to rouse them. He took the form of a parrot, perched in a tree near their dwelling, and began to speak. He observed closely how the brothers were actually spending the days they claimed to have devoted entirely to renunciation.

The parrot sang a verse: happy is the life of those who live on the remnants left from others' generosity, for they win praise in this life and happiness in the next. One of the brothers, hearing it, took the words as praise of themselves and called the others to listen.

The parrot replied that he was not praising them. He called them carrion-eaters and said that the food they ate was refuse, not the remnants of generous giving. The brothers answered that they had been ordained for seven years and lived in the forest of Mejjharanna on remnants, and asked whom the parrot was praising if he criticized their food.

The parrot shamed them by saying that what they lived on was like what lions, tigers, and other predators leave behind, which is refuse and not the remnant of a gift. The brothers then asked who, in that case, truly lives on remnants. He explained that those who first offer alms to monks and brahmins and then eat what is left over are the true eaters of remnants.

Having shamed the brothers and shown them where their food and their lives had drifted, the Bodhisatta returned to his own abode. His unsparing honesty cut deeper than any praise could, because it named something they could not pretend not to recognize in their own daily routine.

The story gives its lesson in the parrot's two contrasting pictures: those who live on what is left after they themselves have given, and those who live on offerings while giving up the effort the offerings were meant to support. The seven brothers could not mistake which of the two they had drifted toward.

At the story's end, the Buddha taught the Truths and identified the seven brothers with the amusement-loving monks of the present, and Sakka, the parrot, with himself. The same quiet drift from genuine practice into comfortable routine, once named plainly by an honest visitor, remained just as correctable in the present as it had been for seven brothers in a forest long before.

What reached the seven brothers was never a lecture on doctrine, but a single unflattering word: carrion-eater. It was spoken by a visitor who had first sung what sounded like praise before telling them what they needed to hear. A visitor who only flattered them would have changed nothing, and one who only scolded them might never have been heard at all. It was this honest speech, offered with a verse they could first mistake for kindness, that let seven comfortable men see how far they had wandered from the path they still believed themselves to be walking.