Bhallaṭiya Jātaka

The Bhallatiya Jataka of the Pali Canon, numbered 504 among the Buddha's birth stories, was told to Queen Mallika of Kosala during a quarrel with her husband, King Pasenadi, over the respect he owed her as queen. Believing the Buddha unaware of the king's anger, Mallika was surprised when he visited the palace and offered this story of the past to show her a devotion that had already outlasted centuries.

Long ago, King Bhallatiya ruled in Benares and loved nothing better than the hunt. Wanting venison, he set out with hounds and weapons into the wilderness, chasing his quarry far from his attendants until he found himself climbing alone along a mountain stream on Gandhamadana, deep in the Himalayas.

As he followed the stream upward through a landscape of flowering trees and falling water, he heard weeping ahead of him. Parting the foliage, he saw two kinnaras, fairy beings of the high mountains, embracing each other and crying as though their hearts would break.

Bow in hand, Bhallatiya stepped forward and asked what sorrow could move such radiant creatures to tears, wondering whether some beast had harmed their kin or some calamity had befallen their home.

The kinnaras answered that no beast and no death had touched them. A storm had once swollen the river between them, and for a single night they had been forced to stay on opposite banks without the sight of one another. The female kinnara told him that she had spent that lone night gathering flowers and perfumes, preparing to greet her mate the moment the water fell again. Seven hundred years lacking three, that is, six hundred and ninety-seven years, had passed since that one night, and they still mourned it as though it had only just ended.

The kinnaras told the king that their kind lives a thousand years, untouched by the illnesses that shorten human life. Even with so much life yet before them, they could not set aside their sorrow over a single night already centuries in the past. Three hundred years still remained to them before their own lives would reach their natural end, and not one of those remaining years had done anything to dull what they still felt over the single night they had lost.

Bhallatiya stood in silence, struck by what he had heard. He reflected that creatures granted a thousand years of untroubled life still grieved so deeply over one lost night. Human beings, whose own years rarely reached a hundred, spent their much shorter time in anger, quarrels, and the hunting of creatures no less eager to live than themselves.

Moved by this thought, Bhallatiya set aside the chase that had brought him there. He returned to Benares no longer the eager hunter who had ridden out that morning. From that day he gave up the hunt, distributing alms and governing his kingdom with the wealth and care he had once spent in pursuit of game. The hounds and weapons that had carried him into the Himalayas were put aside for good, and the king who came back down the mountain was not quite the same man who had climbed it.

Having finished the story, the Buddha revealed who its characters had been. The King of Kosala was the male kinnara, Mallika herself was his grieving mate, and the Buddha himself had been King Bhallatiya, who once stood listening beside that mountain stream.

What this story offered Mallika was not an argument about who was right in her quarrel with Pasenadi, but a measure to set beside it. If a single night's parting could still move devoted hearts to tears after nearly seven centuries, a quarrel between two people who still shared every one of their remaining days together was a smaller thing than it felt in the moment. The same devotion the Buddha had just described in the kinnaras was already present, however buried, in the two who were hearing the story told.