Godha Jataka

A monk who had taken ordination under the Buddha was repeatedly invited by one of Devadatta's followers to abandon his almsround and enjoy the lavish food served at Devadatta's own dwelling. He resisted for a time, but eventually gave in and went secretly to eat the fine rice and solid food on offer. When his fellow monks discovered what he had done and brought him before the Buddha, the Buddha recognized a susceptibility to bad company that was not new to this monk. He told a story from a far older life to show him exactly where such friendships led.

In that former age, the Bodhisatta (the being who would in a future life become the Buddha) was born as the king of a large community of iguanas living together in a network of burrows. He ruled with foresight as well as wisdom, and even prepared a hidden escape outlet from the burrow long before any danger arrived, simply as a precaution. His own son, as he grew, formed a close friendship with a chameleon, a creature the Bodhisatta warned him repeatedly was beneath their kind and dangerous to trust. The warnings went unheeded, and the friendship continued.

As the young iguana grew larger and stronger, his embraces grew crushing, and what had once been simple affection began to genuinely frighten the chameleon, who feared for his own life each time his friend drew near. Rather than end the friendship outright, the chameleon began looking for a way to be rid of the danger entirely, and his fear curdled slowly into a plan for revenge.

After a storm drove ants from the ground and scattered the iguanas out hunting for food, the chameleon saw his opportunity. He sought out a hunter who specialized in catching iguanas and led him straight to the burrow where the entire community made its home, telling him exactly how to smoke the creatures out of hiding.

The hunter piled brushwood and wet leaves before every entrance to the burrow and set them alight, driving thick smoke deep into the tunnels while his dogs and weapons waited outside for whatever fled. Scores of iguanas died in the chaos that followed, unable to see or breathe their way to safety in time.

The Bodhisatta alone knew of the hidden outlet he had quietly kept ready since before any of this began. Through it he broke free of the smoke and flame and reached open air on a rocky height above the ruin of his community. Looking back at the wreckage of the burrow his foresight alone had let him survive, he spoke of what had happened in verse. Keeping company with the wicked brings no lasting happiness, he said, exactly as the chameleon's friendship had brought disaster down on an entire clan of iguanas who had done the creature no harm beyond loving him too roughly.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that Devadatta had been the treacherous chameleon, and that the disobedient monk before him had been the iguana's own son. The Buddha himself had been the iguana king, who prepared his escape before he ever needed it and grieved for a community a single bad friendship had destroyed. Jataka No. 141 of the Pali Canon's Ekanipata (the 'book of ones,' a section grouping tales by their number of verses) records the tale under this telling.

The chameleon's treachery did not begin as cruelty for its own sake. It began as a small, repeated fear that his larger friend's embraces, however fondly meant, would one day crush the life out of him before anyone intended any harm at all. The jataka does not ask its listeners to see the chameleon as simply wicked from the start. It shows a believable fear left unaddressed, curdling slowly into a willingness to destroy an entire community of harmless creatures rather than simply walk away from a friendship that had become genuinely frightening to remain inside.

The Bodhisatta's repeated warnings about the chameleon never once relied on exaggeration or fabricated danger; he simply named, accurately, the kind of creature his son had chosen to trust. The son's failure was not a failure of information, since he had been told plainly and often, but a failure to let that information outweigh the pleasure of a friendship he preferred not to examine too closely. The same gap between being warned and actually heeding a warning is exactly what had carried the monk back to Devadatta's table more than once before anyone needed to intervene.

The Bodhisatta's hidden escape route is easy to read as simple luck, prepared out of habitual caution rather than any specific premonition of this particular disaster. Its presence changes nothing about what happened to the colony his son's friendship ultimately doomed. It only explains why the one figure wise enough to distrust the chameleon from the beginning was also the only one left to grieve for everyone who had not shared that wisdom in time.