Ahigundika Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning a novice who had been ordained by a certain distinguished Elder and then badly mistreated by him. The novice left the monastic order over this treatment, and the Elder persuaded him to return. But when the same ill treatment happened twice again, the young man refused to come back a third time no matter how finely the Elder spoke to him. When the monks spoke of the matter in the Dhamma Hall, the Master said that the youth had been just as sensitive to such treatment in a former life, and he told this tale. The same frame story is told in full in the Salaka Jataka (No. 85). Jataka No. 365 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, and it lies among the verses of the Pañcanipāta.

In the city of Benares, a wandering snake charmer, an ahigundika, caught a monkey and trained him to play with a snake before the crowds, so that he might earn his living from the animal's tricks. The monkey's life under this master was one of hard handling and little gentleness.

One week, a festival was proclaimed in Benares. Wishing to spend seven days in the festival's revelry, performing with his snake, the snake charmer left the monkey in the care of a grain merchant, the Bodhisatta, the Buddha himself in this past life, who earned his living by selling grain. The Bodhisatta took the creature in.

Rather than merely tolerating the arrangement, the Bodhisatta fed the monkey well for the length of the festival. The monkey, who had not known such kindness under his own master, grew calmer and healthier with each passing day.

On the seventh day, the snake charmer, drunk with liquor, came to reclaim his monkey. The man took the monkey and beat him three times with a piece of bamboo. Then he tied the monkey up in a garden and fell asleep. The monkey slipped his chain and climbed a mango tree, where he began to eat the fruit.

When the snake charmer woke and saw the monkey in the tree, he thought to coax him down with flattery. He called up to the monkey in verse, praising him and asking him to drop down some mangoes, since the two of them, he said, lived by the monkey's tricks alike.

The monkey answered the charmer in four verses. He said that such praise was empty noise, and he asked who it was that had starved him and beaten him savagely that very day while drunk. He said that even if he were someday made a king, he would not wish for that, for he remembered the charmer's cruelty and the painful bed on which he had lain. Wise people, he added, should form their closest bonds with those known to live content at home, to be generous, and to come of a good family. Having spoken, the monkey vanished into a crowd of monkeys, never to be caught by that master again.

The Bodhisatta, the grain merchant, stands at the beginning of the story as the one whose seven days of care showed the monkey what kindness was. The tale's own verses carry the rest: the monkey trusted the memory of the beating over the charmer's flattery.

The Buddha closed the teaching by identifying the novice in the frame story with the monkey of the ancient tale, and the mistreating Elder with the snake charmer who thought fine words could undo years of beatings. Just as the monkey trusted the evidence of the rod on his back over the honey in the charmer's voice, the novice trusted the pattern of his own repeated mistreatment over his teacher's repeated promises. The Buddha's telling of the story offered no correction to that judgment, only a recognition that it was the same judgment a wise animal had once made in the city of Benares.