Vīṇāthūṇa Jātaka

The Pali Canon's Vinathuna Jataka, Jataka No. 232 of the Jataka commentary (cited by scholars as J.ii.224), was told by the Buddha at Jetavana after a rich merchant's daughter in Savatthi ran away with a hunchback. The Buddha told the monks that this was not the first time she had done such a thing, and recounted a story from a much earlier birth in which, under strikingly similar circumstances, she had eloped with a hunchback once before.

In that earlier birth, the Bodhisatta was himself a wealthy merchant. When his son came of age to marry, the Bodhisatta arranged his son's marriage to the daughter of a merchant of Benares, and the two families made ready for the wedding.

Before the wedding, the girl had once watched a bull receive great honor in her own parents' house, and asked her nurse why an animal should be shown such reverence. Told that a bull of fine build and bearing was honored for his strength, she quietly resolved, without telling anyone, that she would give her heart only to a man built along those same lines.

Catching sight of a hunchback in the street some time later, the girl mistook his raised, misshapen back for the broad shoulders of just such a man, and fell in love with him on the strength of that single glance. She bribed her nurse, gathered her jewelry, and slipped away with the hunchback by night, leaving both families to discover in the morning that the bride had vanished.

When the news reached him, the Bodhisatta did not send servants in his place. He gathered a company of attendants and rode out himself toward Benares to bring his son's bride home, following the road the couple had taken.

The hunchback and the girl traveled through the night, but at daybreak his strength gave out. Seized by colic and a wrenching pain in his back, he collapsed on the road and could go no further. The girl could do nothing but sit down beside him.

It was in this state that the Bodhisatta's company found them. Seeing the girl sitting beside the collapsed hunchback, the Bodhisatta rebuked her in verse:

Seeing at last exactly what her mistake had cost her, the girl answered him in a verse of her own:

The Pali closes her verse with chinnatanti yathā vīṇā — "like a lute whose string is severed" — the very image that gives the Jataka its name, Vīṇāthūṇa, "the lute's broken peg."

Having heard her own admission, the Bodhisatta had the girl bathed and adorned, and carried her home in his own carriage, so that the marriage so nearly abandoned could go forward as originally arranged.

The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the birth for the assembled monks: the girl of Savatthi and the girl of the Benares story were one and the same person across both lives, and the Benares merchant whose son's bride had so nearly been lost was the Bodhisatta himself.

What nearly undid both weddings was never force or malice, but a single unexamined impression, formed in childhood from one glimpse of an honored bull, that kept resurfacing lifetime after lifetime unchanged. The hunchback's deformed back told the girl nothing at all about his character or his fitness as a companion; it only resembled, at a glance, a strength she had once seen praised in an animal. A lute's broken peg cannot hold a string however well the rest of the instrument is made, and a partner chosen for so mistaken a reason fails a marriage in exactly the same way.