Brahachatta Jātaka

The Brahachatta Jataka of the Pali Canon, numbered 336 among the Buddha's birth stories, was told at Jetavana about a monk whose scheming ways reminded the Buddha of a cleverer thief from an earlier age. He related this story of the past to show what had happened then.

Long ago, the King of Benares conquered the neighboring kingdom of Kosala and took its king captive. The defeated king's son, Prince Chatta, escaped the conquest and made his way to Takkasila, where he studied the three Vedas, the sacred Brahmanical scriptures, and the eighteen traditional arts and sciences under a renowned teacher, in time joining a forest settlement of five hundred ascetics.

Chatta persuaded the ascetics to travel with him to Benares, promising that he would answer any challenge the local scholars raised against them. True to his word, he defended the group so skillfully before King Brahmadatta that the king, impressed by their learning, invited the entire company to lodge within his own royal pleasure garden.

The garden was no chance lodging. Buried within it, in a row of iron pots, lay the very treasure the King of Benares had carried off after conquering Kosala years before, the spoils of the war that had cost Chatta his father's throne.

Once settled in the garden, Chatta had large leather sacks made in secret. Working at night, he dug up the buried pots, emptied the gold into the sacks, and refilled every pot with grass before covering the ground again as though nothing had been disturbed.

With the gold loaded and the ascetics gathered, Chatta led the whole company out of Benares and on to Savatthi. There he used the recovered treasure to reclaim his father's throne, leaving no pursuit, no confrontation, and no reckoning behind him in Benares.

Some time later, King Brahmadatta had the garden pots unearthed for some purpose of his own, only to find them filled with grass where gold had once been. Overcome with grief at the loss, he wandered the palace crying out again and again, grass, grass, unable to set the word aside.

The Bodhisatta, the Buddha in that former life, serving as the king's minister, asked him plainly why he kept crying out over grass, and who it was that had taken it from him. The king answered that he blamed Chatta alone, the one who had put grass in place of gold.

The Bodhisatta answered that what Chatta had taken had always been his own, since the gold was the spoil of his father's conquered kingdom, and that what he had left behind was grass and nothing more, worth no king's grief. Hearing this, Brahmadatta acknowledged that such matters do not always follow the rules a wronged man wishes they would, set his sorrow aside, and returned to ruling his kingdom with a settled and righteous mind.

Having finished the story, the Buddha revealed who its characters had been: the dishonest monk at Jetavana was the clever Chatta of that former life, and the Buddha himself had been the wise minister who finally eased the king's grief.

What this story offered the monks at Jetavana was not a verdict on whether Chatta's trick was right or wrong, since the tale never has him caught, punished, or made to answer for it at all. It was a demonstration of how a loss can be carried two different ways: as a wound reopened by repeating its name, or as a fact set into its larger history and then let go. The Bodhisatta did not have to decide Chatta's guilt to free the king from his grief. He only had to help Brahmadatta see the gold inside the fuller story of where it had come from, and in that larger telling, grass alone was no longer a thing worth mourning.