Ārâmadūsaka Jātaka

Jataka No. 46 of the Ekanipata, Khuddaka Nikaya, opens not with monkeys at all, but with the Buddha himself on an alms-journey through a hamlet of Kosala. A village squire had invited him to a meal in his own pleasure garden. As the monks looked around the grounds afterward, they noticed one patch where nothing young or green was growing, bare in a way the rest of the garden was not. They asked the gardener why, and he explained that a village lad, set to watering the young saplings there, had pulled every one of them up by the root to see how deep each root ran, then watered them accordingly — and every sapling had died of it. Hearing this, the Buddha told the monks that the very same lad had ruined a garden once before, in a far earlier life, and at their request he told the story of that earlier ruin.

In the reign of King Brahmadatta of Benares, a festival of music and revelry was proclaimed throughout the city, and the king's chief gardener was eager to take part in it. Living in the royal pleasure grove was a troop of monkeys whom the gardener had long treated with snacks and kindness. Approaching the monkey chief, the gardener said, 'Good friends, the city is celebrating a holiday and I wish to attend. Will you water the tender young saplings while I am away?' The monkey king readily agreed, promising that his troop would perform the task with great diligence. The gardener handed over the leather watering-skins and departed for the festival.

Gathering his subjects, the monkey chief announced, 'Listen, monkeys! Water is scarce and valuable. We must not waste a single drop on a root that does not need it. Pull up every young sapling by its roots to examine how deep they reach. If the roots are deep, pour plentiful water; if the roots are shallow, pour only a few drops.' It sounded, to the monkeys, like prudent economy rather than the destruction it actually was. Diligently following their leader's order, the troop went about pulling up every tender tree in the royal grove to inspect its roots before watering it, leaving each one exposed and already half-killed by the very care meant to save it, until under the blazing sun the entire orchard was withered and dead.

The Bodhisatta, a discerning gentleman of Benares, happened to be passing by and saw monkeys busy at what looked, from a distance, like gardening. Coming closer, he found the grove already ruined, and asked why they had pulled up tree after tree instead of simply watering them where they stood. The monkeys answered, with evident pride in their own thoroughness, that they were only following their king's own command: to judge each root's depth before deciding how much water it deserved. Good intentions had produced exactly this, a garden stripped bare by its own caretakers.

Disturbed that diligence and real affection for the gardener's trust had led, through nothing but foolishness, to total ruin, the Bodhisatta did not simply walk away in silence. He spoke the verse the story is remembered for: 'Tis knowledge crowns endeavour with success, for fools are thwarted by their foolishness — witness the ape that killed the garden trees.' The fault he named was not laziness or malice; the monkeys had worked hard and meant well. The fault was that they had never once asked whether their method made sense, only how faithfully they could carry it out.

Having finished the story of the monkeys, the Buddha completed the connection he had promised the monks at the start: the village lad who had just ruined the squire's garden in this life was the very same monkey king who had ordered his troop to pull up every sapling long ago, and the wise man who had rebuked that folly in the old tale was the Buddha himself in an earlier birth. A fault repeated across two lifetimes, he showed them, is still the same fault — mistaking energetic effort for the wisdom to know whether that effort is helping or harming, a distinction no amount of goodwill can supply on its own.