Bandhanāgāra Jātaka

The Master told this story while staying at Jetavana, and its occasion was a prison. A gang of burglars, highwaymen and murderers had been caught and brought before the king of Kosala. The king ordered them to be made fast with chains, ropes and fetters.

Thirty monks from the country, who wished to see the Master, had come to Jetavana and paid their respects. Next day, as they went for alms, they passed the prison and saw the prisoners bound there in great misery.

In the evening the visiting monks came to the Buddha and told him what they had seen. The prisoners were held fast in chains and fetters, they said, and could neither break them nor run away. Then they asked a plain question: is there any fetter stronger than these?

The question was an honest one. They had looked at real iron and real suffering, and they wanted to know whether the Teacher knew of a bond that held harder still.

The Master did not dismiss what they had seen. He agreed that those were fetters indeed. But he told them that the fetters made of craving for wealth, for grain, for sons, for wives and for children are stronger than iron ones a hundredfold, even a thousandfold.

He added that even these hard-to-break fetters had been broken in the olden time by wise men, who went to the Himalaya and became anchorites. Then he told them an old-world tale. The tale is numbered 201 in the collection of birth stories.

Once, while Brahmadatta ruled over Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a poor man's family. When he grew up his father died, and he worked for wages to support his mother.

His mother, much against his will, brought a wife home for him, and soon afterwards she herself died. Then his wife conceived. Not yet knowing this, he told her that she must now earn her own living, for he meant to renounce the world.

She answered that she was with child, and asked him to wait and see the baby before he went to become a hermit. He agreed. When the child was born he said again that he must turn hermit. She asked him to wait until the child was weaned, and after that she conceived once more.

The Bodhisatta saw where this was leading. If he kept agreeing to each new request, he thought, he would never get away at all. So he resolved to go without saying a word to her.

He rose in the night and fled. The city guards seized him on the way. He pleaded that he had a mother to support and begged to be let go, and they released him. After staying in a certain place for a while, he passed out by the chief gate and made his way to the Himalayas.

In the Himalayas he lived as a recluse. In the rapture of meditation he caused the Supernatural Faculties and the Attainments, meditative powers and deep states of concentration, to arise within him.

As he dwelt there he exulted that the bond of wife and child, the bond of passion so hard to break, was broken. Then he spoke two verses.

In the first verse he said that the wise do not call iron, rope or wooden bars a strong fetter. What binds far more firmly, he said, is passion and love for child or wife, and for precious gems and golden earrings.

In the second verse he asked who could find release from such heavy fetters, since these are the ties that bind. If the wise can burst them, he said, they are free, leaving all love and all desire behind.

Having spoken these verses as an aspiration, the Bodhisatta did not break the charm of his ecstasy. Still in that meditation, he attained to Brahma's world. The story gives no sign of regret or looking back in him, only the steadiness of a man who has set down a heavy load.

When the Master ended his discourse, he declared the Four Noble Truths. At the end of the Truths, some of the listeners entered the First Path, some the Second, some the Third and some the Fourth, the four successive stages of awakening.

Then the Master identified the birth. Mahāmāyā was the mother of that life, and King Suddhodana was the father. Rāhula's mother was the wife, Rāhula himself was the son, and the Master himself was the man who left his family and became an anchorite.

The monks had looked at a prison and asked about iron. The Buddha answered by turning their eyes inward, to the quiet ties that no guard locks and no king orders. A chain can be struck off by a smith or loosened by a pardon, but craving binds from within and asks for no lock.

The story does not scorn the wife or child, and it does not pretend that leaving was easy. It shows a man who had to be firm for his own liberation. Its two short verses were remembered well enough that the Dhammapada, a well-known collection of the Buddha's sayings, carries their near twin.