Dhajaviheṭha Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha told this story to show that even long before his final enlightenment he had already labored for the good of the world. The occasion called for an old memory, and so he related a birth in which he had appeared as Sakka, king of the gods, to repair a wrong that had fallen upon every honest ascetic in a kingdom because of one dishonest man.

In the city of Benares, under King Brahmadatta, there lived a wizard skilled in dark arts. By day he went about the streets in the guise of a Buddhist brother, accepting the alms and courtesies that the pious people of Kasi offered to any man who wore the ochre robe. By night, using his magic power, he slipped unseen into the queen's own chamber and corrupted her, returning to his daytime disguise before the city woke. For a long while no one suspected him, since the outward show of robe and bearing shielded him from every eye.

The queen, uneasy at the secrecy of her visitor and wishing to know who he truly was, pressed her vermilion-stained hand against his back as he left her one night, marking him without his knowledge. It was a small act, but it was enough: the telltale red print would betray him to anyone who later saw his bare shoulders in daylight.

Some time afterward, the king's men came upon a man standing on one foot in the public cemetery, performing what looked like an act of sun-worship. Drawing close, they saw the vermilion mark upon his back and recognized him for what he was. But before they could seize him, the wizard called upon his sorcery and flew up into the air, vanishing from their grasp and leaving them with nothing but the memory of his guilt and no way to punish it.

When the matter reached King Brahmadatta's ears, his anger did not stop at the one guilty man. Reasoning that "these men go about by day in the ascetic's garb and misconduct themselves by night," he condemned the entire order of mendicants for the crime of a single impostor who had merely worn their appearance. He issued a proclamation banishing every genuine Brother from his kingdom of Kasi, a realm three hundred leagues in extent, on pain of punishment wherever one might be found.

The decree was obeyed, and true renunciants who had never wronged the queen or anyone else departed the land along with the memory of the one wizard who had deceived it. Deprived of teachers who might have reminded them of charity, restraint, and the law of karma, the people of Kasi grew coarse and heedless. Giving fell away, virtue was neglected, and when they died most of them were reborn not in states of happiness but in states of suffering, for want of anyone left to guide their conduct.

From his heavenly seat, Sakka, who was the Bodhisatta in that existence, looked down upon the kingdom and saw what the banishment of the innocent for the sin of one impostor had done to an entire people. He resolved to undo the king's heretical anger and restore the land's teachers, and for this task he sought out an elderly paccekabuddha, a solitary enlightened being of plain and unremarkable appearance, to serve as the center of the lesson he intended to teach.

Sakka took on the radiant form of a strikingly handsome young monk and brought the aged paccekabuddha with him to stand in the air above the king's own palace gate, where the whole court could not help but see. There, in full view of King Brahmadatta, the beautiful young monk bowed low and paid earnest homage to his plain, unlovely companion, treating him with every mark of the deepest reverence.

The king, astonished, called up to ask why one so fair in form would show such deference to a priest of such homely appearance. Sakka answered that a teacher's worth is not measured by his face or his bearing but by the place he holds as a guide toward virtue, and that reverence rightly follows wisdom and holiness wherever they are found, however plainly they are dressed. When the king pressed further and asked who addressed him from the sky, Sakka declared his own name and standing as lord of the gods of the Thirty-Three, giving weight to the counsel that followed.

Sakka went on to explain, in verses exchanged with the king, what a kingdom gains by honoring its genuinely virtuous teachers: praise and goodwill among the living in this very world, and after death a path that leads toward the heavens rather than away from them. The king, who had let the crime of one disguised wizard poison his judgment of an entire community of honest renunciants, began to see how far his anger had carried him from the truth.

Persuaded by what he had heard and seen, King Brahmadatta renounced the heretical anger that had driven his proclamation. He revoked the banishment, invited the true Brethren back into his kingdom of Kasi, and undertook to abandon pride, to practice virtue himself, and to offer hospitality and support to the teachers his hasty decree had once driven away. The kingdom's temples and almsgivers slowly filled again with the very renunciants whose only fault had been to resemble, in outward dress, a man who had never truly been one of them.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha revealed what had become of each figure in it. The paccekabuddha who had stood humbly in the sky had long since passed into final Nibbana. The king who had learned, at such cost, the difference between a robe and the virtue it is meant to signify was in that life Ananda. And Sakka, who had descended from heaven to mend a wrong done to every honest ascetic in the land, was the Buddha himself in a birth long before his final awakening.

The Dhajaviheṭha Jataka, No. 391 in the Pali canon, takes its name from the injury done to the sacred banner of the robe: not by the wizard's sorcery alone, but by the king's own rash judgment, which let one impostor's crime fall as punishment upon every innocent wearer of the same ochre cloth. The commentarial tradition has long read this story as a warning against two mirrored errors at once, mistaking a counterfeit for the real thing, and then mistaking every genuine article for a counterfeit once the fraud is exposed. Reverence, the tale insists through Sakka's own example, belongs to virtue and wisdom themselves, not to the face, the fame, or even the robe of the one who carries them, and a single impostor's guilt should never be allowed to strip an entire community of the honor it has rightly earned.