The Peerless Archer Who Declined a Throne

At Jetavana, the Buddha told the monks that his renunciation of worldly life as Gautama was not the first time he had set aside a throne for a higher purpose. In an age long past, he said, the Tathagata, an epithet for the Buddha, had renounced the white parasol of royalty once before, and the story that followed showed how that renunciation had unfolded.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta was born as Asadisa, prince of Benares and son of King Brahmadatta, whose name meant "peerless" or "without equal." Sent to the great center of learning at Taxila, he mastered the three Vedas and the eighteen practical arts. In archery above all, he emerged with a skill so extraordinary that no other bowman in the land could rival him.

When his father died, the throne would naturally have passed to Asadisa as the elder son, but he found himself without ambition for rule and asked instead that his younger brother take the crown. He wanted nothing more than to live quietly, expecting no trouble from a choice made so plainly and without resentment.

Certain courtiers, jealous of Asadisa's skill or eager to sow discord for their own advantage, went to the new king and claimed that his brother secretly coveted the throne after all. The king, believing the slander, ordered Asadisa's arrest. Rather than risk a confrontation that could cost either brother his life, Asadisa fled Benares and traveled to a distant kingdom. There he concealed his royal birth and took service as an ordinary archer for a wage of one hundred thousand a year, his true skill known to no one.

The foreign king, curious about this new archer, once asked him to demonstrate his skill. Asadisa shot a single arrow that pierced a cluster of mangoes high in a treetop and continued rising until it seemed to vanish toward the heaven of the Four Great Kings, the guardian deities of the lowest celestial realm. He then loosed a second arrow with even greater speed, striking the first in mid-flight and turning it back downward, so that it fell again with a sound like thunder, cleanly severing the mango cluster without the arrow ever touching the earth. The feat astonished the court, yet Asadisa still did not reveal who he truly was or why such skill had come to serve a foreign king for an archer's wage.

Word soon reached Asadisa that seven kings had allied against his own brother and surrounded Benares, certain of an easy victory against a kingdom with no champion capable of resisting so overwhelming a force. His brother, now desperate and remembering the archer he had once driven away, sent for Asadisa to return. Asadisa did not hesitate over the old injury done to him. He wrote a message on an arrow, naming himself and warning that he intended to end the siege with a single shot, and let it fly toward the place where the seven besieging kings sat eating together from a golden dish. The arrow landed squarely among them, and the kings, recognizing both the warning and the skill behind it, fled from the city half-dead with fright, abandoning the siege entirely.

The siege ended without a single soldier's life lost on either side, resolved entirely through a single arrow that made further violence pointless. Having proven his skill one final time and settled the old quarrel with his brother without rancor, Asadisa renounced his worldly desires, left the household life behind, and devoted himself to cultivating the higher knowledges, the meditative powers won through deep practice, and other attainments of a renunciant.

The Buddha closed the story by naming the figures within it for the monks gathered at Jetavana. Ananda, he said, had been the younger brother who let slander turn him against the one who had given him a kingdom freely. The Buddha himself had been Asadisa, the elder brother who gave up both a throne and, later, a grudge, twice walking away from power rather than defending it by force. Jataka No. 181 of the Pali Canon's Dukanipata records the tale under this telling.

Asadisa's year of service in a foreign land is easy to read past, yet it carries its own quiet teaching. A man capable of ending a siege with one arrow spent that entire year drawing an archer's ordinary wage, his true identity and his true skill hidden from everyone around him, and nothing in the story suggests this troubled him. His mastery did not need an audience or a title to remain genuine, and when the moment finally came that required it, the skill was simply there, undiminished by all the time it had gone unrecognized.

The story's shape asks to be read as two renunciations rather than one. The first, stepping aside from the throne, cost Asadisa comfort and standing but asked nothing of his heart, since he had never wanted to rule in the first place. The second, returning to save the brother who had believed slander and tried to have him arrested, asked for something harder: setting aside a legitimate grievance to protect a person who had wronged him. The tale's quiet suggestion is that renouncing power is the easier discipline, and renouncing resentment against someone who misused power against you is the one that actually measures a renunciant's heart.