The Music Teacher and the Ungrateful Pupil

Long before he became the Buddha Gautama, the Bodhisatta was born in Benares as Guttila, son of a musician, and grew into the most accomplished teacher of the seven-stringed lute, or vina, that Jambudipa (an ancient name for the Indian subcontinent) had known. He never married, so that every coin he earned could go toward caring for his aged and blind parents. His reputation for both skill and devotion drew students from distant lands, and this episode is recorded as Jataka No. 243 in the Jatakatthavannana, the classical Pali commentary that preserves the Jataka tales.

A young man named Musila came from Ujjeni and pleaded again and again to be accepted as a pupil. Guttila read something troubling in the young man's manner and refused him at first. Only when Musila and his family continued to plead at length did Guttila relent and agree to train him as he trained every other student, holding nothing back.

In time Musila mastered the instrument as very few ever had. Success, however, did not make him grateful; it made him ambitious. He demanded a court salary equal to his teacher's, and when that demand met resistance, he grew only bolder, insisting before the king that he and Guttila were now equals and should be judged as such before the people.

Musila proposed a public contest to decide once and for all who was the greater musician, and he staked his own life on the outcome, so certain was he of his own skill. The king agreed to let the people of Benares be the judges.

Guttila felt age and fear close in together. He dreaded not simple defeat but the deeper shame of losing before the city to the very pupil he had raised from nothing. In his distress he withdrew deep into the forest, prepared to give up his life rather than endure that humiliation.

There Sakka, king of the gods, appeared before him in splendor. He consoled Guttila, urged him not to despair, and promised that he himself would stand unseen at his side when the contest came, so that no harm would reach him.

On the day of the contest, before the assembled king and court, Guttila played first and played brilliantly, and Musila matched him note for note. Then, by Sakka's hidden power, one string of Guttila's lute snapped — and the music continued without the smallest flaw. One by one every string broke in turn, until Guttila held only the bare frame of the instrument, and still it sang, more beautifully than most musicians could manage with every string intact.

When Musila tried to answer this wonder by breaking a string of his own lute, no sound came from it at all. The gathered crowd, who had come only to judge a contest of skill, saw plainly who had played with integrity and who had claimed a mastery he did not truly possess. Their anger at his deceit turned against him there in the assembly, and he did not survive it.

Delighted by his old friend's triumph, Sakka carried Guttila up to Tavatimsa, the heaven of the Thirty-Three gods, where he was given leave to play his lute among the gods for seven days.

While there, Guttila asked the shining nymphs how they had come to such glory, and each described some small act of goodness from a former human life — a flower offered at a shrine, a robe given to one in need, a single kind word spoken without expectation of return. When Sakka returned him safely to his parents in Benares, Guttila spent the rest of his days teaching the people of the city that same lesson of small, sincere virtue.

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana after Devadatta boasted that he had learned everything by his own power and owed nothing to any teacher. Revealing the connection between that boast and the ancient tale, the Buddha explained that Devadatta had been Musila in that birth, Anuruddha had been Sakka, Ananda had been the king of Benares, and he himself had been Guttila, the master of the vina.

The Guttila Jataka endures because it weighs the debt owed by any pupil against the generosity a true teacher extends without calculation. Guttila's music survived the loss of every string because it was rooted in integrity rather than display, while Musila's skill, for all its real polish, could not survive the single test that exposed his character. The Buddha closed the tale, as he opened it, by returning attention not to the drama of the broken strings but to the patient, unglamorous virtue that even the gods of Tavatimsa trace back to small and sincere acts of giving.