Cakkavaka Jataka

The Teacher told this story while dwelling at Jetavana, concerning a monk who had grown greedy for requisites and had let his duties toward his own students lapse. Each morning this monk entered Savatthi, ate rice-gruel and other food at the house of the devoted laywoman Visakha, and then ate again through the rest of the day at the homes of Culla Anathapindika, the King of Kosala, and still other households, never content with what a single almsround had already given him. When the other monks discussed his greed in the Hall of Truth, the Teacher summoned him and asked whether the report was true. The monk admitted that it was. Asked why he behaved this way, the Teacher explained that the very same greed had carried this same monk, in a former life, all the way from the carcasses of Benares to a distant Himalayan lake, and told the following story to show how old the pattern already was.

Jataka No. 434 of the Pali Canon tells of the Bodhisatta born into the avian kingdom as a noble ruddy goose, a cakkavaka, celebrated in verse for its radiant golden plumage, melodious call, and lifelong devotion to a single mate. He lived on a lotus-covered lake in a secluded Himalayan valley with his virtuous companion, the two of them feeding exclusively on tender water weeds, aquatic moss, and floating lotus seeds, their feathers catching the morning sun like polished gold.

At that time, a gluttonous crow from the outskirts of Benares flew over the mountain ridge. In the city he had lived an anxious, frantic life scavenging around burning grounds, open gutters, and slaughterhouses. He gorged on bloated carcasses and rancid waste, perpetually afflicted by indigestion, the fear of stones thrown by street children, and a restlessness that never let up. His feathers were dull, oily, and coal black, his eyes bloodshot and shifting.

Landing on the lake's green bank, the crow watched the two geese glide across the water with mounting envy. He approached the Bodhisatta with exaggerated courtesy, asking what heavenly delicacy could possibly produce such blinding gold, since he himself feasted day and night on rich marrow and salted fat from the slaughterhouses of Benares and yet remained coarse, greasy, and black as charcoal by comparison.

The Bodhisatta turned his noble head and answered at length, explaining that a creature living in perpetual fear and violent turmoil should not wonder why its own flesh lacked luster. Food taken through violence, hoarded through gluttony, and eaten in constant dread, he said, could never truly nourish body or spirit, since every morsel swallowed that way carried fear, suspicion, and remorse along with it.

He described his own life on the lake by contrast: harming no creature, shedding no blood, content with simple green moss and water lilies and pure drops of mountain dew. His heart was free of malice and anchored instead in quiet affection for his one companion. A creature who lives without enmity, satisfied with modest sustenance and settled in harmony with those around it, he said, radiates its health and beauty from within rather than borrowing it from any particular meal. The crow's own coal-black feathers and scrawny frame, he told him plainly, were simply the outward mirror of a mind still agitated and still grasping.

The crow listened to the whole of it with sullen disdain, unwilling to give up the particular pleasures of garbage and rotting carcasses no matter how clearly their cost had just been explained to him. He cawed harshly before flapping back toward the stench of the Benares gutters he had never really intended to leave. The Bodhisatta and his faithful mate returned to their tranquil life on the lake, untroubled by having failed to persuade him.

What the story leaves unresolved on purpose is any suggestion that understanding alone was ever going to change the crow's course. He heard the full explanation, every stanza of it, and simply chose the familiar discomfort of the gutters over the harder work of giving up a diet built on violence. Recognizing a truth and living by it are two entirely different achievements, however closely the story lets them sit side by side in a single conversation. The two geese, for their part, never attempt to force the lesson further once their answer is given. They return to their own quiet life, offering no second argument, as though truth itself needed no reinforcement beyond having been spoken clearly once to a listener free to take it or leave it.

When the Teacher had finished telling the story, he revealed who each creature in it had been. The greedy crow, he said, was this same greedy monk in an earlier life; the faithful goose who kept him company was Rahula's own mother; and the noble goose who spoke the nine stanzas was the Teacher himself. Hearing the teaching through to its end, the monk who had once run from house to house for one meal after another attained the fruit of the second path.

This jataka shares its basic shape with another ancient tale of the same name. There, a crow asks the identical question of a different pair of geese and receives a different explanation for his own dullness, one centered on the residue of old wrongdoing rather than on his violent diet directly. Read together, the two tellings suggest something worth noticing. A single surface question, why does one creature shine while another stays dull, can be answered truthfully from more than one angle, whether traced to the cruelty of a creature's daily habits or to the deeper weight of what that creature has already done.