Bhadraghata Jataka No. 291

Jataka No. 291, the Bhadraghata Jataka of the Tikanipata, opens with a frame story set in the Buddha's own time. A nephew of the great merchant Anathapindika squandered an enormous inheritance of forty crores of gold, returning to his uncle again and again for more money until Anathapindika, exasperated, gave him nothing but coarse garments and finally had him removed from the house entirely. Destitute, the nephew collapsed by a side wall and died there. When Anathapindika reported this to the Buddha, troubled that he could not satisfy his own nephew's need, the Buddha answered with a question that reframed everything: how could Anathapindika expect to satisfy a man whom the Buddha himself, in a far earlier life, had failed to satisfy even after giving him a Wishing Cup. The Buddha's monks, hearing this strange reply, asked him to explain, and he told them the following story from an age long past.

In the far distant past, during the reign of King Brahmadatta in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was himself born as a wealthy merchant's son who inherited a treasure of four hundred million gold pieces upon his own father's death. The Bodhisatta lived very generously, giving alms throughout his whole life, and upon his own death was reborn as Sakka, King of the Devas. He left behind his own grieving son, who proved wholly unlike him in character: a young man given over entirely to drunkenness, gambling, and dissolute living. Surrounding himself with rogues, dancers, and sycophants, paying a thousand pieces to tumblers and singers for a single night's drunken entertainment, the youth squandered the entire family inheritance within only a few short years until he was reduced to wearing rags and begging outside temple gates.

Sakka, looking down from Tavatimsa heaven, saw his former son's destitution and was moved by compassion despite everything that had happened since his own death. Even death and rebirth into an entirely different form of existence, the story implies, had not erased a father's love for his son.

Sakka descended and placed a magical vessel, the Bhadra-Ghata, the Wishing Cup, into the young man's hands. He warned him sternly: take care not to break this cup, for so long as you keep it whole, your wealth will never come to an end. Overflowing with joy, the young man immediately wished for food, drink, and fine clothing, and resumed his old life of extravagant feasting, now with a bottomless source to fund it, his father's warning already fading from his mind as the feasting began.

Blinded once more by luxury and intoxicated with wine, the young man gathered his companions for a boastful celebration. Wanting to impress them with the source of his sudden fortune, he began tossing the precious cup into the air and catching it again like a performer's toy, laughing at how easily wealth now came to him. His trembling, drunken hand missed the catch. The cup fell to the earth and smashed. Everything the cup had provided vanished with it. The young man, now without even the memory of his father's compassion to draw on a second time, returned to the same rags and poverty he had known before. Within a short time he was dying destitute by a wall, exactly as his modern-day counterpart would one entire lifetime later, having learned nothing from the loss that had already undone him once.

At the conclusion of the discourse, the Buddha identified the birth plainly: Anathapindika's nephew, the rascal who had broken the Wishing Cup and died by a wall in both lifetimes, was one and the same soul, and the Buddha himself declared, "I myself was Sakka," the compassionate but ultimately powerless giver who had tried once before, across an entire lifetime earlier, to rescue the very same heedless heir from his own appetite. No gift, however magical or inexhaustible, had proven able to outlast the heir's own carelessness, a fact the Buddha offered Anathapindika not as an answer that would ease his grief but as an honest explanation of why even boundless generosity had failed twice over.