Candakumara Jataka

On Vulture Peak, the Buddha's monks spoke of how Devadatta, in his hatred, had repeatedly sought the Buddha's life. The Buddha told them that this was not the first time such malice had moved against him; the same pattern had played out once before, in a far older life, and he recounted the whole of that older story.

In that former age, in the city of Pupphavati, Prince Candakumara served as heir to his father, King Ekaraja, and earned a reputation across the realm for settling disputes with scrupulous fairness. This fairness threatened Khandahala, the royal chaplain, who had long profited from bribes paid to sway the king's own judgments. When a wronged petitioner despaired of Khandahala's corrupt court and begged Candakumara to hear his case instead, the prince ruled justly in the man's favor. The king, delighted to see true justice done at last, appointed his son chief judge in Khandahala's place, cutting off the chaplain's illicit income at a single stroke and earning his undying hatred.

Khandahala's chance for revenge came when King Ekaraja, troubled by a vivid dream of the heavenly Tavatimsa realm, asked his chaplain what a mortal must do to reach such a paradise. Khandahala answered that only a sacrifice of extraordinary scale could open heaven's gates: a fourfold offering drawn from every category the king possessed, down to his own sons, daughters, wives, and chief ministers, with Candakumara named first among them. The horrified king wavered again and again, moved by the pleas of his own parents, his wives, his children, and the gathered people, all of whom begged him to abandon the scheme. Each time, Khandahala insisted that any lesser resolve would forfeit heaven entirely, and the king's wavering resolve kept bending back toward the sacrifice.

When the appointed day came, victims by the hundreds were bound at the execution ground, with Candakumara and his family placed at the very center of the horror. Among them stood his wife, the princess Canda, who watched the executioner raise his sword toward her husband's neck. In that final instant, she performed what the tradition calls an Act of Truth. She declared, with a sincerity she asked the truth of the universe itself to witness, that she loved nothing in her life more than her righteous husband, and called upon that truth alone to save him from an unjust death.

At that exact moment, Sakka, king of the gods, who had been watching the atrocity unfold, descended in blazing splendor and scattered the entire assembly in terror. He denounced Khandahala's scheme before the whole gathered court, revealing the chaplain's long history of bribery and deceit, and declared that no soul had ever reached heaven through the slaughter of the innocent.

The people, already outraged at what they had nearly been made to witness, turned on Khandahala and put him to death on the spot for the fraud that had almost cost so many innocent lives. King Ekaraja himself was not killed, but the people would no longer accept his rule after what his wavering had nearly allowed; they drove him out beyond the city walls and raised Candakumara to the throne in his place. The new king restored every intended victim to freedom and filled the kingdom with peace in place of the terror Khandahala's counsel had nearly brought upon it.

The Buddha closed the story by naming the figures within it for his monks at Vulture Peak. Khandahala, he said, had been Devadatta, whose malice in this later life was only a continuation of the same pattern. His own mother in that age had been Mahamaya, his wife Canda had been the mother of Rahula, and their son had been Rahula himself. The princess Sela had been Uppalavanna, and his brothers Sura, Candasena, and Suriya had been Kassapa, Moggallana, and Sariputta. The Buddha himself had been Candakumara, later known as King Candaraja, the prince whose own plain fairness Khandahala could never forgive. Jataka No. 542 of the Pali Canon's Mahanipata records the tale under this telling.