Ayoghara Jataka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning his own Great Renunciation, the night he left behind his palace, his wife and newborn son, and the throne waiting for him, to seek what no royal inheritance could give him. Jataka No. 510 of the Pali Canon preserves this earlier telling of the same choice, made long before in a different kingdom under a different crown.

In the kingdom of Kasi, King Brahmadatta ruled at Benares, but a dreadful curse haunted his household. A co-wife of the chief queen, who had been barren, had once prayed to devour the queen's child, and her anger against mother and son carried her into her next birth as a yakkhini, an ogress. When the queen's firstborn son was born, the ogress seized him from his mother's sight and devoured him, and when a second son was born, she did the same. The king, helpless against an ogress, could not protect them.

When the queen conceived a third time, the Bodhisatta himself entered her womb, and the anxious king sought counsel on how to save this child. Of the remedies suggested, he chose to build a house of iron. Smiths raised a great foursquare hall of iron in a pleasant spot in the town, lit by lamps that burned continually, and a strong guard was set around it over the nine months it took to build.

In the iron house the queen gave birth to the Bodhisatta, who was named Prince Ayoghara, Iron House, for the fortress that sheltered him. Guards stood all around, and within its walls he grew in wisdom and was taught all the sciences. Meanwhile the ogress, seeking water, perished while trying to fetch it from the great king Vessavana, and so the danger was ended before the prince ever came out.

At sixteen, Ayoghara was a strong and handsome young man. The king resolved to hand him the kingdom and had the city decorated. The prince was seated on a splendid state elephant and carried in procession around Benares to receive the white umbrella of kingship, a sight of the city he had never seen before.

Seeing the splendor of the city for the first time, Ayoghara asked why he had been kept confined. The courtiers told him how the ogress had devoured his two brothers and how the iron house had saved his life. He saw that he had spent ten months in the womb and sixteen years shut in, and that having escaped the ogress he had not escaped old age and death. He reflected that royal power is hard to leave once taken up, and resolved to ask his father's leave to become an ascetic in the Himalayas.

The king, moved by his son's beauty, ordered the coronation prepared. Ayoghara instead asked to renounce the world, and when his father asked why, he spoke of his weariness with existence. His father would not give his permission.

Before leaving, the prince taught his father in twenty-four verses that nothing can stand against death: not armies, strength, horses and elephants, nor physicians, charms or magic, and that only righteous conduct brings blessing. Like an elephant breaking its chains, he then broke his attachments, bade his parents farewell, and left.

His father renounced the throne and followed him, and the queen, the courtiers, and the people of the city went too, a crowd stretching some twelve leagues toward the Himalayas. There Sakka sent Vissakamma to build a great hermitage. The Bodhisatta ordained his followers and taught them the divine abidings and meditation, and most of them attained meditative absorption. At the end of their lives, two-thirds were reborn in the Brahma realm, and the remaining third were divided: some were reborn in the Brahma realm, some in the heavens of the senses, and some, having fulfilled a seer's task, in the human world.

What the iron house finally shows is the limit of even the most absolute precaution: a wall thick enough to stop an ogress could not touch the one threat every person born into the world already carries. Ayoghara's parents had succeeded in what they set out to do, keeping their son alive for sixteen years. It was when he finally looked out on the world, and learned why he had been hidden, that he saw how little any fortress could do against the one enemy iron was never built to resist. That clarity did not make him despair. It sent him toward the holy life, and brought so many others with him.