Culladhammapāla Jātaka

The Culladhammapala Jataka of the Pali Canon, numbered 358 among the Buddha's birth stories, was told at the Bamboo Grove after the monks had been discussing how often Devadatta had tried, and failed, to take the Buddha's life. To show that this was not the first time such cruelty had reached for him, the Buddha related this story of the past.

Long ago, in Benares, King Mahapatapa ruled beside his queen, Canda, a woman known for her grace and devotion. When their son, Prince Dhammapala, was seven months old, Canda sat with the child in her private chamber, wholly given over to him, bathing and delighting in him as any mother might.

The king entered unannounced, and the queen, absorbed in her son, did not rise at once to greet him as custom required. Mahapatapa took this small delay as proof that the infant had claimed a devotion that belonged to him alone, and feared, beneath his anger, that this son would one day outgrow and overshadow him. He summoned his executioner.

As the king gave his order, Canda fell before him and pleaded that the fault, if there was one, was hers alone, and begged him to spare the child and take her own hands instead. Her plea changed nothing. The king repeated his command, and what followed, step by terrible step, fell upon the infant rather than the mother who had offered herself in his place.

Through all of it, the infant Bodhisatta showed neither fear toward his father, nor anger toward the one who carried out the sentence, nor even desperate clinging toward his grieving mother. He met each of them with the same unbroken loving-kindness, bearing what came to him with a patience that asked nothing of anyone and blamed no one. No cry of protest and no flicker of resentment passed through him at any point, as though the very cruelty meant to break him only revealed how completely his heart had already outgrown the need to answer harm with harm.

When it was over, Canda gathered what remained of her son against herself and gave voice to a grief beyond anything she had known, mourning him in verse after verse until her own heart gave way beneath the weight of it, and she died there beside him.

The king who had ordered a mother's grief and a child's death found he could no longer remain seated on his own throne. The ground itself split open beneath him, unable to bear what he had done, and flame rose from the depths of Avici, the lowest and most severe of the Buddhist hells, to claim him, drawing him down into the very punishment his cruelty had earned.

Having finished the story, the Buddha revealed who its characters had been: Devadatta was the king of that former life, his own foster mother Mahapajapati Gotami (not to be confused with King Mahapatapa) was Queen Canda, and the Buddha himself had been the infant Dhammapala who met his end without hatred for anyone who brought it.

What this story offered the monks at the Bamboo Grove was not simply another account of Devadatta's malice, since they had already heard enough of those to need no further proof. It was a demonstration of how far loving-kindness could be carried, even into circumstances where every ordinary creature would have met cruelty with fear, anger, or desperate pleading. The infant Bodhisatta answered a father's jealousy, an executioner's hand, and a mother's unbearable grief with the very same unshaken kindness, and it was that stillness, carried all the way to its end, that the earth itself could not help but answer in turn. The story asked nothing of the listening monks beyond this single measure: that a heart capable of such patience under the worst the world could offer was the same heart they were each being asked, in far gentler circumstances, to begin cultivating in themselves.