Atthana Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning a discontented monk who wished to abandon the monastic order because of a woman who had caught his heart. Jataka No. 425 of the Pali Canon preserves the ancient tale the Buddha offered him, a story about how fragile an affection can be when it is bought with wealth.

In the days when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the king's son and Mahadhana, the son of a rich merchant, were childhood friends who studied under the same teacher. Mahadhana was the Bodhisatta. When the prince became king, Mahadhana stayed close to him. In the city lived a beautiful and wealthy courtesan, and Mahadhana was devoted to her, paying her a thousand pieces every day and spending his nights at her house. When his own father died and he took up the merchant's post, he went on paying her in the same way.

One evening Mahadhana spent so long in audience with the king that it grew too late to go home for the money. He sent his attendants away and went alone to the courtesan's house, promising to bring two thousand pieces the next day.

The courtesan refused. She would not grant her favors, she said, without the full sum. He pleaded with her again and again, and at last she ordered her maids to seize him by the neck, throw him out of the house, and bolt the door behind him.

Mahadhana brooded on how women can act and grew sick of the household life. He did not go home, and he did not go to see the king. He left the city, built a hermitage on the bank of the Ganges, and lived on wild roots and fruits. There he attained the meditative absorptions and the higher knowledges.

The king missed his friend, and the story of the courtesan's conduct spread through the city. The king summoned her, and she confessed. He ordered her to go and bring the ascetic back, on pain of death. She set out with a great retinue, found the hermitage, and begged his forgiveness for her blindness and folly. She promised to return all the money in her house if he would come back with her.

Mahadhana answered that he would return only when impossible things came to pass, and he spoke eleven verses naming them. The Ganges would have to become calm as a lotus pond, with cuckoos white as pearls. A winter cloth would have to be woven of tortoise hair. A tower would have to be built of mosquitoes' teeth that never toppled, and a ladder made from hares' horns that reached up to heaven, so that mice could climb it, eat the moon, and bring down Rahu from the sky. Flies would have to drink strong liquor from full jars, donkeys would have to sing and dance, crows and owls would have to meet and court each other, and sparrows would have to carry away the Himalayas in their little beaks. When she pressed him, he named the same conditions again. Yet in the end he forgave her.

The courtesan returned to Benares and told the king, and begged for her life, which was granted. The Buddha then taught the Truths, and the monk who had wished to leave attained the fruit of the First Path, stream-entry. The Buddha identified the king of that story as Ananda and the ascetic as himself, the Bodhisatta. The Buddha answered the monk's temptation not by condemning the woman but by showing him a man once as thoroughly infatuated as he was, and what became of that man.

What distinguishes Mahadhana's story from a simple tale of betrayal is how little time he spent in grief before turning the humiliation into something else. He did not nurse the insult or plot revenge. He turned to the ascetic life and found a calm no transaction could buy or take from him. And when the one who had wronged him came asking for his return, he did not meet her with cruelty, but he also did not go back. In the end he forgave her, and her plea had to be answered by an impossible list rather than by his return.