Dhonasakha Jataka

The Buddha addressed the monks at Bhesakala Grove concerning Prince Bodhi of Sumsumaragiri. Bodhi had commissioned a skilled artisan to build him a palace unlike any other, then, purely from envy, had the artisan blinded so that no rival prince could ever commission a palace to equal it. When the monks debated among themselves how a man could commit so calculated a cruelty, the Buddha told them that this same violence had marked Prince Bodhi across a much older lifetime, and he related the Dhonasakha Jataka, Jataka No. 353 of the Pali Canon, to show them exactly how far back the pattern reached.

In a former age, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta, the Buddha himself in an earlier birth, taught at the renowned school of Takkasila, and among his students was a young prince who would himself one day be named Brahmadatta. Observing the boy's character closely, the teacher warned him plainly: that he was harsh, cruel, and prone to violence, and that whatever power a violent man managed to seize for himself would prove short-lived no matter how completely he seized it. The prince heard the warning and set it aside entirely.

Once he came to the throne, Brahmadatta marched out and conquered the whole of Jambudvipa, the known world of the Indian subcontinent, dragging back a thousand captured kings as the measure of his total victory. Only Takkasila itself, the very city where he had once studied, resisted him successfully, remaining beyond his reach no matter how he pressed the campaign.

Frustrated by this one unconquered city, the king turned to his ambitious priest, Pingiya. Pingiya proposed a solution dressed as religious obligation: a great sacrifice, performed with the thousand captive kings as its offering, that would surely grant the power needed to finally take Takkasila. The king, eager for any path toward completing his conquest, agreed to the scheme without hesitation.

At a great banyan tree, the king had his wrestlers render the thousand captive kings unconscious one by one. He orchestrated their deaths and their blinding as part of the ritual, establishing around the tree a rimmed enclosure that filled with blood to a depth of five inches as the offering proceeded. The king boasted openly that he was fulfilling a sacred religious duty, confident that such devotion could only be rewarded.

In the battle that followed this atrocity, a Yakkha, a flesh-devouring spirit-being, tore out the king's right eye without warning. As he reeled in agony from the sudden wound, a vulture passing overhead dropped a sharp bone that struck and destroyed his remaining left eye as well. Blinded entirely, exactly as he had blinded others, the king collapsed in the same darkness he had inflicted on a thousand captive men.

In his agony, the king recognized at last what his old teacher had tried to tell him years before. Mortals experience results corresponding exactly to their own deeds, just as fruit corresponds to the seed from which it grew. The short-lived power his teacher had warned him about had indeed proven short-lived, ending not in further conquest but in the exact darkness he had so recently created for a thousand other men.

The Buddha concluded by identifying the figures in the tale for the monks troubled by Prince Bodhi's cruelty toward the artisan. Prince Bodhi, he told them, had been the conquering king in that distant life, and Devadatta had been Pingiya, the priest whose ambition dressed violence in the language of sacred duty. The teacher who warned the prince and watched his warning go unheeded, the Buddha said, had been himself.

The jataka's deeper point rests on the gap between a warning spoken once, in a schoolroom, to a boy who had not yet done anything to confirm it. That same warning was proven true only after a thousand captive kings had already lost everything to the violence the teacher foresaw. A warning given early enough to prevent harm is nearly impossible to prove correct, since nothing has happened yet to demonstrate it. A warning proven correct by events has usually already arrived too late to prevent them. The jataka does not resolve this timing problem so much as simply name it, for anyone wise enough to act on a warning before its proof becomes necessary.