The King Who Forgave His Captor

At Jetavana, a courtier of the king of Kosala came to the Buddha after being released from a prison he had been thrown into on the strength of jealous slander. During his time behind bars, he had practiced with such sincerity that he reached the first stage of awakening. The Buddha told him that he was not the only one to draw good out of evil in this way; the wise of old had done the very same thing once before.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta ruled Benares as King Ekaraja, governing with such fairness that even a minister caught in misconduct within the royal harem was simply banished rather than punished more harshly. That exiled minister carried his grudge into the service of Dabbasena, king of Kosala, where he rose to become a trusted adviser. There he began planting the idea that Benares, ruled by so gentle a king, would fall to almost no effort at all.

To confirm this, raiding parties were sent against Benares three times, and three times Ekaraja met them not with punishment but with mercy and gifts, exactly as the minister had predicted he would. Convinced the kingdom was defenseless by temperament rather than by strength, Dabbasena invaded with a full army.

Benares in fact had a thousand capable warriors who could have met the invasion and likely won, but Ekaraja refused to let anyone suffer on his account. He declared that whoever desired his kingdom enough to take it by force could have it, and rather than resist, he opened his own gates and sat calmly on his throne to await whatever came.

Dabbasena had Ekaraja seized and hung head-downward from the lintel of a doorway in his own former palace, a death designed to be slow and to make an example of the fallen king before anyone who might witness it.

Hanging in that position and facing certain death, Ekaraja did not let his thoughts turn toward the man responsible for his suffering with anything but goodwill. He deliberately cultivated loving-kindness toward Dabbasena himself, and his concentration grew so complete that it carried him into deep meditative absorption. The ropes binding him are said to have burst of their own accord, and Ekaraja rose from his bonds, seated calmly in the air, radiating the same boundless goodwill outward without interruption.

At that very moment, Dabbasena was seized with a burning pain throughout his body that no physician could explain, crying out and rolling on the ground in an agony that mirrored exactly what he had tried to inflict. His attendants investigated and found the king suspended peacefully in the air, radiating nothing but loving-kindness toward the very man torturing him. They understood that Dabbasena's pain was the direct consequence of cruelty turned against a mind too pure to hold any resentment at all.

Overcome with shame, Dabbasena rushed to free Ekaraja and begged his forgiveness, which was given freely and without any trace of resentment. Dabbasena offered to drive out his own rebels and restore the kingdom in full. Ekaraja, having already accomplished everything his heart had aimed at in that suffering, chose instead to renounce the throne entirely and take up the ascetic life, a path that led him in time toward rebirth in the Brahma realm, a high heavenly plane reached through deep meditative attainment.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming Ananda as Dabbasena, and revealing that he himself had been Ekaraja, the king whose loving-kindness remained complete enough, even while hanging from his own former threshold, to leave no opening for hatred to take root. Jataka No. 303 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, offered to show that metta, the loving-kindness Ekaraja had practiced throughout, is not a passive sentiment but an active power capable of transforming even the hand that inflicts suffering.

Ekaraja surrenders his throne not once but twice in this story, and the two surrenders reveal different things about him. The first, opening his own gates rather than let a thousand warriors die defending him, was an act of restraint toward people who had done him no wrong. The second, declining Dabbasena's offer to restore him once the truth of his holiness was plain for everyone to see, was something else entirely. It was proof that he had never wanted the throne back in the first place, only the chance to meet cruelty without being changed by it. Having met that test fully while still hanging from his own doorway, there was nothing left for the crown itself to offer him.