Dadhivahana Jataka

Jataka No. 186 of the Pali Canon opens not with King Dadhivahana himself but with four brothers of Kasi, the kingdom whose capital was Benares, who renounced the world together and took up the ascetic life in the Himalayas. When the eldest of the four brothers died, he was reborn as Sakka, lord of the gods, and in time he returned to visit the three ascetics who remained. To each of them Sakka gave a treasure. One received a razor that could serve equally as an axe. Another received a drum whose two faces could either drive away elephants or befriend them. The third received a bowl from which a stream of curd would flow at its owner's will.

A man of Kasi, shipwrecked and desperate, was cast up on an island where a wild boar kept a wishing-gem that could carry its holder through the air. While the boar slept, the man seized the gem and rose into the sky; the boar, robbed of its jewel, met its end. Carrying the gem into the Himalayas, he found the three ascetics and saw at once what their treasures were worth. He offered the gem in exchange for the razor-axe, and the first ascetic, trusting him, agreed to the trade. He did the same with the second ascetic for the drum, and with the third for the curd-bowl.

After each exchange, once he was safely away, the man commanded the razor-axe he had just won to strike down the ascetic who had trusted him and bring the gem back to his hand. It did so three times, and by the time he left the Himalayas none of the three remained alive to tell of the exchange. He now held the gem and the three magic treasures that should never have belonged to any one man.

Carrying his treasures towards Benares, he halted outside the city and sent word to the king: yield the kingdom or give battle. When the king marched out, the man beat the drum and a fourfold army stood about him; then he overturned the curd-bowl, and a great river of curds swept over the king's host. At his command the razor-axe brought him the king's head, and no one could stand against him. Entering the city, he was anointed king and took the name Dadhivahana, the curd-bearer, in honor of the very bowl that had carried him from a shipwreck to a throne. He ruled Benares in a splendor built on treasures that had cost three trusting ascetics their lives.

One day a mango stone came floating down the river from the distant Lake Kannamunda and washed ashore near the royal bathing ghat. King Dadhivahana ordered his gardeners to plant it in the royal grounds, and the tree that grew from it surpassed every mango tree before it, its fruit so fragrant and sweet that the king prized it above all his other possessions.

Proud of his tree beyond any rival, King Dadhivahana sent baskets of its fruit to neighboring kings as diplomatic gifts. But he first pierced every stone with a needle, so that no other kingdom could ever grow a tree to rival his own. One neighboring king, deeply offended at receiving a gift deliberately spoiled before it ever arrived, resolved to answer the insult by ruining the tree that had caused it.

The offended king sent a skilled gardener to Benares with secret instructions to win a place tending the royal mango tree and then destroy its sweetness from within. The gardener proved his skill, was welcomed as the tree's keeper, and set immediately to clearing away the healthy shrubs around its trunk. In their place he planted bitter nimba trees (neem, prized medicinally but known for its intensely bitter sap) and poisonous creepers, training their roots to interlace with the mango's own roots beneath the soil.

Within two seasons, the bitterness of the nimba and the poison of the creepers had seeped into the mango's own roots and risen through its trunk. When the next harvest ripened, the fruit looked exactly as golden and perfect as ever. But when King Dadhivahana bit into it, he found only bile and poison where sweetness had always been, and no one in the court could explain how a tree untouched by any blade or axe had turned against itself.

It was the Bodhisatta, serving in that life as King Dadhivahana's own counselor, who uncovered what the court's gardeners had missed entirely. Tracing the mango's failing sweetness to the roots tangled beneath the soil, he explained to the king that the tree's nature had not changed at all. Root bound to root and branch mingled with branch, the bitterness of its poisonous neighbors had simply traveled into the one tree that had once stood apart from them. It happens just as a person's own nature is slowly carried away by whatever company surrounds it day after day.

On the Bodhisatta's counsel, the king ordered the nimba trees uprooted and the poisonous creepers torn away. The tainted soil was dug out and replaced, and the mango's roots were nourished with milk and sweet water until the corruption was drawn back out of them. Within a year the tree's fruit regained its old celestial sweetness. The Bodhisatta used the restored tree to teach the court a lesson that outlasted the mangoes themselves: even the noblest nature, left too long entangled with the corrupt and the bitter, will eventually bear their fruit instead of its own.