Culla Palobhana Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha spoke to a monk troubled by discontent, telling him that women had led even sincere, believing souls astray since long before this life. To show him how far that danger could reach, he told a story of a prince who once held himself entirely above it.

In that former age, in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born a prince to King Brahmadatta and given the name Anitthigandha, meaning one who detests the scent of women. From his earliest infancy he wept if a woman or a female nurse came near him, and could only be cared for by men. As he grew into his sixteenth year, he showed no interest in marriage, in courtly pleasure, or in the kingdom he stood to inherit, devoting himself instead to solitary reading and meditation.

The king, anxious that his line might end with a son who wanted no part of royal life, grew desperate for a way to turn the prince's heart toward the world. A skilled courtesan, hearing of the king's trouble, came forward and promised that she could awaken in the prince what no one else had managed to stir, if the king would reward her for it. The king agreed at once.

The courtesan studied the prince's habits and positioned herself just outside the chamber where he sat each morning in meditation, singing with a voice sweetened by genuine skill rather than any obvious appeal to desire. Day after day the sound reached him, and having never once in his life needed to guard himself against such a thing, he found himself asking her to come closer. The distance between them closed entirely, and the aversion he had carried since infancy gave way all at once.

What followed went far beyond a single lapse. The prince's new infatuation turned fierce and possessive. He drew his sword against any man who so much as looked at the woman he now could not bear to leave, until the disorder he caused grew too great for the palace to contain. His father banished the two of them together, and the prince who had once refused to let a woman near him now followed this one into exile, settling with her in a rough hut between river and sea.

One day, while gathering fruit, the prince came upon a wandering ascetic whose deep meditation had been shattered by the very same woman's allure as she passed near his retreat. The ascetic fled in distress toward the sea, and the prince, seeing in this stranger's unraveling an unmistakable mirror of his own, gave chase not to harm him but to reach him before despair carried him any further.

Catching up to the shaken ascetic, Anitthigandha spoke of women as a danger capable of consuming a committed practice the way fire consumes dry grass. It was a warning he could not have delivered with any real weight before his own fall had taught him exactly what such consuming felt like from the inside. The ascetic, steadied by words spoken with such hard-earned authority, recovered his composure and resumed the practice that had nearly been lost to him.

Having spoken the truth aloud to save another man, Anitthigandha heard his own words land on himself as well. He left the woman he had once abandoned every vow to keep and withdrew into the forest alone. There he took up again the deep meditative discipline he had once practiced before any voice had ever reached him through a chamber wall, in time attaining a destiny in the Brahma realm, a high heavenly plane reached through deep meditative attainment.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that he himself had been that same youth, the prince who had once wanted nothing to do with women at all. Even so, he had still found himself undone by a single voice he had never learned to guard against. Jataka No. 263 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, offered to show the discontented monk before him that no aversion, however absolute it feels, can stand in for wisdom actually tested.