Culladhanuggaha Jataka

At Jetavana, a certain monk grew restless with longing for the wife he had left behind when he took ordination. Haunted by memories of her, he confessed to the Buddha that he feared he could no longer continue his monastic life. The Buddha told him that this same woman had brought him to ruin once before, in a distant birth, and that her nature had not changed in all that time. To show the monk what he had already suffered at her hands, the Buddha related this story, preserved in the Jataka collection of the Pali Canon as Jataka No. 374.

Long ago in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as Sakka, king of the gods, while on earth there lived a young man renowned as Culladhanuggaha, the Little Archer, a pupil who had mastered the bow under a great teacher. As his fee for training, the teacher gave him his own daughter in marriage. In time the young archer set out with his bride for his home village, carrying his weapons and his confidence in his own skill.

Their path lay through a wild hill-country road where a rogue elephant had long terrorized travelers, blocking the way and killing any who approached. When the beast charged at the couple, the archer did not flinch. He loosed a single arrow with such force that it pierced clean through the elephant's skull and came out the other side, dropping the great animal where it stood. The archer and his wife walked on past the carcass, and his fame as a marksman only grew with the telling.

Further along the same road, fifty robbers held another stretch of the pass. The archer, confident in his skill and perhaps too proud of his reputation, sent his wife ahead to ask the bandits for cooked food. The robbers handed her raw meat instead of roasted meat, a petty insult that stung the archer's pride when she returned with it. Offended, he spoke sharply against the robbers, and they, unwilling to be shamed by a lone traveler, rose up together to kill him.

The Little Archer answered the charge with his bow. Arrow after arrow flew true, and forty-nine of the fifty robbers fell before his aim, joining the dead elephant as proof of his mastery. Only the chieftain of the band remained standing. When the archer's quiver was finally empty, he closed the distance and grappled the chief with his bare hands, wrestling the big man down to the earth and pinning him helpless beneath his knee.

Holding the robber captive, the archer called to his wife to bring him his sword so that he might finish the chief and be done with the whole band. But as she looked at the captured robber, a sudden and reckless passion for the stranger's strength overtook her, and in that single disastrous moment she pressed the sword's hilt into the robber chief's hand rather than her husband's. Freed and armed, the robber struck down the Little Archer where he knelt, and the man who had slain an elephant and forty-nine bandits died by his own wife's hand as surely as by the blade.

The robber chief took the woman and all her ornaments and pressed on until they reached a river swollen with floodwater. There he turned the matter over in his mind: a woman who would betray and help kill the husband who had protected her with his life would just as readily betray the man who replaced him. Feigning concern for her treasures, he asked her to remove her jewels and garments so that he might carry them across first and keep them dry, then return for her. She trusted him and handed everything over. The robber swam across alone, dressed himself, gathered the jewels, and disappeared into the hills, leaving her alone, stripped, and weeping on the muddy bank.

Watching this unfold from his heavenly seat, Sakka resolved that the woman's self-deception needed a mirror held up before her eyes. He enlisted two companions for the lesson: the charioteer Matali and the gandharva Pancasikha, both of the retinue of the gods. Sakka himself took the form of a jackal with a piece of meat held in his jaws, and came trotting along the riverbank directly in front of the shivering, abandoned woman.

Matali, transformed into a fish, leapt up out of the shallow water in full view of the jackal. Seeing what looked like easier prey, the jackal dropped the meat from his mouth and lunged for the fish. The fish, true to its nature, slipped straight back into the water and escaped untouched. In the same instant, Pancasikha, transformed into a hawk, swooped down, seized the abandoned meat in its talons, and flew off with it before the jackal could turn back.

The jackal was left standing on the mud with nothing at all, having let go of a sure meal in the mouth for the mere appearance of a better one in the water. Watching this little comedy of greed play out before her, the naked woman could not help laughing aloud at the foolish jackal who had lost both the fish he never caught and the meat he had already possessed.

The jackal turned and spoke to her plainly: fair one, laugh not, when thou shouldst weep. She retorted that the jackal deserved its hunger for such stupidity, nothing more. But the jackal answered that she, too, had just lost both the husband who died for her and the lover who abandoned her, trading loyalty for lust and ending with neither man and nothing to show for the trade. Stung by the truth of it, the woman changed her tone and promised that she would seek out a new husband and be faithful to him from that day onward.

At this, Sakka cast off the jackal's form and stood before her in his full divine radiance, Matali and Pancasikha beside him. He answered her promise of reform with a verse comparing her to a thief who, having once stolen a clay pot, would just as readily steal a pot of brass the next time the chance arose: a nature bent toward betrayal does not mend itself through mere words of regret. Overcome with shame at being seen so clearly by the king of the gods, the woman fell silent, and Sakka and his companions returned to their heavenly abode, the lesson delivered.

Having finished the tale, the Buddha revealed the births to the restless monk: the backsliding brother before him had been the Little Archer in that birth, the former wife he longed for had been the very same treacherous woman abandoned on the riverbank, and the Buddha himself had been Sakka, king of the gods, who exposed her faithlessness through the jackal's trick. Hearing this, the monk understood how much he had already lost to this same woman's nature across the turning of lives, and it is said that he attained the fruit of the First Path upon hearing the Buddha's words.

The Culladhanuggaha Jataka endures in the commentarial tradition as a plain warning against surrendering hard-won virtue to a sudden impulse of desire. The archer's downfall came not from any weakness of skill, for he had felled an elephant and forty-nine robbers without faltering, but from placing his life's safety in a single moment of trust that passion overturned in an instant. Sakka's jackal, dropping a certain meal for an uncertain one, mirrors exactly the woman's error, and the verse about the clay pot and the brass pot remains one of the tradition's sharper proverbs on whether a betrayer's character can truly change. For the monk at Jetavana, and for every reader since, the story's quiet counsel is the same: guard the loyalty you have been given, and do not mistake fleeting desire for lasting good.