Asatamanta Jataka

The Buddha told this story, No. 61 of the Jataka collection, concerning a monk of Jetavana who had fallen into lovesickness over a woman and could no longer settle his mind to practice. Rather than rebuke him outright, the Buddha reached back to an old tale from Takkasila to show how even the wisest teacher once had to cure a pupil of the very same affliction, and how the cure revealed more about the danger of unchecked craving than any lecture could.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was a brahmin of great learning who became a Disapamokkha, a renowned master teacher, at Takkasila. Students came to him from distant towns to study the sacred lore, and among them was a bright young brahmin from Benares who, at sixteen, had been given a choice by his parents between a life devoted to the fire-sacrifice or a life of household learning. He chose learning, and his parents sent him off to Takkasila to study under the Bodhisatta.

The youth applied himself and in time returned home believing his education complete. But something in him had grown restless on the journey, a nameless unease he could not place, though it had everything to do with how little he understood of women and of his own susceptibility to them.

At home, his mother asked whether his studies were truly finished. When he said yes, she pressed further: had he not omitted the Dolour Texts? He admitted he had never heard of them. Alarmed, she sent him straight back to his teacher, insisting he could not call himself educated until he had learned them, though no such texts actually existed in any curriculum Takkasila taught.

The young man returned to the Bodhisatta and asked to be instructed in the Asatamanta, the Dolour Texts, the knowledge he had supposedly left incomplete. The Bodhisatta, perceiving at once that the boy was burning with a desire he did not yet recognize for what it was, agreed to teach him, but only after a period of service first. By then the Bodhisatta had retired to a forest dwelling to care for his own mother, who was a hundred and twenty years old and blind.

The Bodhisatta set the youth to attend his elderly mother directly, washing her, feeding her, and tending to every need, exactly as a devoted son would. But he added one peculiar instruction: as the youth rubbed her hands, her feet, her head, and her back, he was to exclaim aloud how lovely she still was even in her great age, and to wonder what beauty she must have possessed in her youth. He was also told to report back to the Bodhisatta everything the old woman said in response.

Day after day the youth performed his service and repeated the praises exactly as instructed, never suspecting what such words, poured again and again into an idle and unguarded mind, might eventually produce. Slowly, improbably, the old blind woman began to believe the flattery was sincere desire. She started to imagine that the handsome young attendant truly wanted her, and the thought took root until it could not be dislodged.

One day she asked him outright whether his heart was set on her. Following his master's instructions to report everything honestly, the youth did not deny it. Emboldened, she told him that if he truly desired her, he must first kill her own son, the Bodhisatta, so that the two of them could be together without obstacle. The youth was appalled, but he carried the proposal back to his teacher exactly as he had been told to carry back every word.

The Bodhisatta was not surprised. He had suspected from the start what unchecked craving could do even to a frail, pious old woman in the last years of her life, and he had set the test precisely to make this visible to his student rather than merely tell him about it. He carved a life-sized figure from the wood of a fig tree, dressed it in his own robes, and laid it on his bed as though he were sleeping there. He then gave the old woman an axe and had the youth guide her hand along a length of string toward the bed, telling her this was her chance to strike.

Believing she was striking her own son, the old woman brought the axe down upon the wooden figure's throat. The dull, lifeless impact of wood rather than flesh told her instantly what she had done and who she truly was prepared to become. The shock of the revelation was more than her frail body could bear, and she died on the spot, her time, the story says, having already come.

Witnessing the entire chain of events, the youth understood at last what his teacher had meant to show him: that desire, left unguarded and unexamined, can overtake reason in anyone, however old, however pious, however unlikely, and drive them toward acts they would never otherwise contemplate. He declared before his master that women ungoverned by restraint could become like devouring fire, consumed by their own passion, and that he himself wished to renounce such entanglements and seek peace in a hermitage. Cleansed of the infatuation that had sent him home confused and restless, he settled his mind and returned to a life of disciplined study.

When the telling was finished, the Buddha identified the figures in the old tale with people known to the gathered monks. The pupil's mother of those days, he said, was Bhadda Kapilani, later a leading nun; the pupil's father was Maha-Kassapa, one of the Buddha's foremost disciples; the troubled pupil was Ananda, the Buddha's own attendant; and the wise teacher who had devised the test was the Buddha himself in that earlier birth.

The Asatamanta Jataka does not survive as a tale about any one woman's failing but as a warning aimed at anyone who imagines themselves safely beyond the reach of craving. Age, piety, and a lifetime of restraint proved no shield once desire found an opening, and it took a teacher's carefully staged demonstration, not a sermon, to make an infatuated student see the truth plainly enough to turn back from his own unguarded longing. No. 61 endures because the test it describes, peeling away illusion until a craving reveals its own danger, remains exactly as searching now as it was in Takkasila.