The Treasurer Who Refused No Friend

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 131 of the Ekanipata as recorded in the Pali Canon, when the monks discussed Devadatta's ingratitude toward him. The Buddha explained that this was not the first time Devadatta had repaid kindness with contempt, and related a tale from a previous birth showing the same pattern in a far more ordinary setting.

In Rajagaha, during ancient days, the Bodhisatta was born into a treasurer's family and became known as Sankha, worth eighty crores (eighty times ten million) of gold. In the city of Benares lived another treasurer of equal fortune named Piliya, and though they lived in different kingdoms, the two were bound by a long-standing friendship of mutual trust.

A reversal of fortune struck Piliya: his wealth collapsed entirely, leaving him destitute. He traveled with his wife to Rajagaha and sought out his old friend. Sankha received him warmly, and without hesitation divided his entire fortune in half, giving Piliya forty crores along with cattle, carts, and servants, restoring him to prosperity in Benares.

In time, the wheel of fortune turned against Sankha himself, and he was reduced to poverty. Remembering that Piliya now flourished because of the gift he himself had once given, Sankha resolved to travel to Benares, not to beg outright but to seek some modest assistance from the friend he had rescued. He walked the long road with his wife, arriving exhausted at Piliya's door.

Piliya, now guarding his restored wealth with a miser's fear that Sankha had come to reclaim it, refused to receive his old friend with any hospitality at all. He sent out, as the whole of his offering, half a measure of spoiled bran, a gift so meager it barely qualified as charity. Sankha, rather than raging at the insult, accepted the bran with quiet equanimity, telling his grieving wife that the fault lay with an ungrateful giver and not with the gift itself, and that their friendship was worth preserving even at this cost.

A servant who had witnessed Sankha's former generosity and Piliya's present contempt carried word of the injustice to the king of Magadha, who summoned both men to answer for it. Piliya could not deny what he had done once the facts were laid before the court. In response, the king ordered that the whole of Piliya's wealth be transferred to Sankha as both restitution and punishment for his ingratitude.

Sankha, hearing the king's judgment, asked for far less than he had been granted. He requested only the return of his original forty crores, along with the cattle and carts that had once been his, declining to take Piliya's wealth or to see his former friend reduced to ruin in turn. He explained that he sought neither revenge nor another man's loss, only enough to support his household and continue practicing generosity himself.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Devadatta had been Piliya, the treasurer who repaid a life-saving gift with half a measure of spoiled bran, and the Buddha himself had been Sankha, who met that ingratitude not with anger but with the same patient forbearance, khanti, that had marked his original generosity. The tale holds up both halves of Sankha's conduct, the openhanded gift and the unresentful restraint that followed its betrayal, as a single, continuous virtue rather than two separate tests.

The king's ruling would have left Sankha wealthier than he had ever been, restored to his original fortune and gifted the whole of Piliya's wealth besides. Yet Sankha asked for only what he had originally possessed. This refusal is treated within the jataka as no less significant than his first act of generosity. A lesser character, having been wronged, might accept a ruler's full vindication as simple justice, but Sankha's request shows that his earlier gift had never been a transaction expecting return, only an act of friendship offered freely. Taking Piliya's entire estate would have turned Sankha's own virtue into a kind of victory over his friend. The jataka's final emphasis falls precisely on his refusal to let generosity curdle into triumph even when the law itself would have permitted it.

Commentators reading the Asampadana Jataka alongside other tales of Devadatta's ingratitude note that this story places two separate tests, generosity in prosperity and forbearance in humiliation, within a single life. It insists they are expressions of one underlying quality rather than two distinct virtues that might exist independently of each other. A person capable of dividing a fortune in half for a friend's sake is shown to be the same person capable of accepting an insult without bitterness. Both responses flow from a heart that was never, even at its wealthiest, attached to possessions as the measure of its own worth.