Dasaratha Jātaka

The Master told this story at Jetavana concerning a man of Savatthi who had been so consumed by grief over his father's death that he had neglected every one of his own duties in the aftermath. Jataka No. 461 of the Pali Canon preserves the ancient tale the Buddha offered him, built around the same loss met in an entirely different spirit.

In the city of Baranasi, King Dasaratha ruled with righteousness, and his chief queen bore him three children: Rama-pandita, Lakkhana, and their sister, Sita. When that queen died, the king elevated another wife to the position of chief queen, and in his love for the son she later bore him, Prince Bharata, he granted her a boon before the child was even born.

Once Bharata came of age, the queen demanded her boon be honored in full: that her own son be crowned in Rama's place. Horrified by so unrighteous a demand but equally afraid of what palace intrigue might do to his children if he refused outright, Dasaratha summoned Rama and Lakkhana in secret.

The king told them that the scheming queen might bring ruin upon them if they remained, and instructed them to live safely in the forest for twelve years, the span the astrologers had declared as the remainder of his own life. Rama agreed at once out of devotion to his father's wishes, and Lakkhana and Sita insisted on joining him in exile in the forest of Himavanta rather than remain behind.

Dasaratha died only nine years later, his health broken by grief over the children he had sent away. The queen moved at once to crown Bharata, but Bharata himself refused outright to take a throne that belonged to his elder brother, and instead marched into the forest with his ministers and army to bring Rama home.

When Bharata found their hermitage and told Rama of their father's death, Lakkhana and Sita collapsed in tears, overwhelmed by the loss. The Bodhisatta Rama alone remained entirely serene, showing neither agitation nor sorrow. When his siblings asked how he could hear such news without weeping, he answered with a teaching on equanimity. Every being born into the world has no certainty beyond death itself, he said, and many seen alive in the morning are gone by evening. Grief changes nothing about what has already happened, he told them, while it torments the one left behind to carry it.

Bharata pleaded with Rama to return at once and take the crown, but Rama held firmly to the exact term his father had set, refusing to cut even three years short of the full twelve. To satisfy Bharata's need for a ruler in the meantime, Rama gave him his own pair of straw sandals, which Bharata placed upon the throne of Baranasi. Whenever ministers judged a case wrongly in Rama's absence, the sandals were said to strike together of their own accord until the judgment was corrected.

When the full twelve years had passed, Rama returned to Baranasi, ascended the throne beside his sister Sita, and reigned with compassion, morality, and justice for sixteen thousand years.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that Dasaratha had been his own father Suddhodana in that former life, that Bharata had been Ananda, that Lakkhana had been Sariputta, that Sita had been Rahulamata, and that Rama himself had been the Buddha.

What the Buddha offered the grieving man of Savatthi was not an argument that grief was wrong to feel. It was a demonstration that the same news could be met without being destroyed by it, by someone who had lost exactly what the man himself had lost. Rama's calm was never indifference to his father's death. It was the clear-eyed recognition that mourning, however natural, could restore nothing that had already been taken, and that a mind undone by sorrow served the living no better than it served the dead.