Daddabha Jataka

Some monks, having watched wandering ascetics torment themselves on beds of thorns and through other severe mortifications, asked the Buddha whether such practices carried any real spiritual benefit. The Buddha told them plainly that they carried no benefit at all, and that the whole business was exactly like the noise a hare once heard. To show them what he meant, he told the following story.

In that former age, when Brahmadatta reigned in Varanasi, the Bodhisatta was born as a lion, dwelling in a cool cavern on the heights of the Himalayas. He was gifted with keen judgment and a steady concern for every creature in the forest below him.

In that same forest, beneath a bael tree, whose fruit is hard and heavy, growing beside a stand of fan-palms, a timid hare lay resting one afternoon. An idle worry crossed his mind: what would become of him if the solid earth ever split open and gave way beneath him? At that very moment, a ripe bael fruit broke loose from the branches above and struck a dry palm leaf just behind him with a sudden, heavy thud.

Convinced without turning to look that the earth itself was collapsing, the hare bolted screaming that the world was ending. Another hare, seeing him run, asked why, and receiving only "run for your life, the earth is collapsing" in reply, began running as well. The alarm passed from hare to hare until every hare in the forest was in flight. Then it leapt species to species, from hares to deer, from deer to boars, from boars to elk and buffalo and wild oxen, until even the rhinoceroses, tigers, and elephants were swept into a single stampeding mass. Each one ran only on the word of the animal just ahead of it, none having seen or heard anything firsthand.

From his high crag, the Bodhisatta saw the dust rising and heard the roar of the stampede and understood at once that no such collapse of the earth was possible. Knowing that the herd was about to run itself straight over a cliff into the sea, he raced down, placed himself in their path, and loosed three great roars that stopped the entire multitude where it stood.

Asked why they were fleeing, the elephants said the tigers had told them the earth was collapsing. The tigers pointed to the rhinoceroses, and the rhinoceroses to the wild oxen. So the chain unwound backward through buffalo, elk, boar, and deer until it reached the hares, and at last the one hare who had heard the sound with his own ears. Asked gently whether he had actually seen the earth give way, the hare could only say that he had heard a great crash behind him and run without looking.

The Bodhisatta carried the trembling hare on his back to the very spot, where the bael fruit lay broken on the crushed palm leaf exactly as the sound had promised, and nothing more. He showed the gathered animals the plain cause of the catastrophe they had so nearly died fleeing, then sent them back to their pastures. He warned them never again to let an unexamined rumor carry them somewhere their own eyes had not confirmed was true.

The Buddha gave no further identification beyond his own, as the lion who had traced the rumor to its source, since the point of the story did not depend on who the hare or the other animals had once been. What mattered was the shape of the mistake itself: an entire forest had nearly destroyed itself acting on a conclusion no one in the chain had ever personally verified. This was exactly what the monks had watched ascetics do, inflicting suffering on themselves for a benefit no one examining the practice closely could actually confirm existed. Jataka No. 322 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, offered as a caution against mistaking a loud, frightening sound, whether literal or merely traditional, for a truth that has actually been checked.