Hatthipala Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha told his monks that his own Great Renunciation of palace, family, and throne was not the first time he had walked away from exactly that kind of life. He recounted a story from a far older age to show them how long this particular pattern had been building.

King Esukari of Benares and his family priest were both childless, and when the priest finally secured a promise of sons through Sakka's intervention, four virtuous gods were offered the chance to be born as the king's own heirs. The four refused that honor outright, telling Sakka plainly that they would rather be born into the priest's own household instead, planning to renounce the world again while still young enough that no one could talk them out of it.

Born to the priest's wife, Bhadda, the four boys were named for the trades they were raised among: Hatthipala among the elephant keepers, Assapala among the horsemen, Gopala among the cowherds, and Ajapala among the goatherds. Dreading the very renunciation the boys themselves intended, the king and priest banished every ascetic from the kingdom of Kasi, hoping to remove any example that might inspire the boys to leave.

When Hatthipala turned sixteen, the king and the priest themselves dressed as wandering ascetics and came to see him, hoping to judge whether the old inclination still lived in him. Hatthipala greeted the disguise with open delight rather than suspicion, praising it as the very image of the life he longed for. When the two men revealed themselves and offered him the throne outright, he refused it without hesitation and set out at once for the forest, trailed by a vast company of people moved by what they had just watched.

The same scene played out again with Assapala, then Gopala, then Ajapala, each tested the same way and each walking away from kingship exactly as his brother had, gathering his own train of followers before joining Hatthipala by the Ganges.

Watching his own sons go, the family priest reflected that he was nothing more than a withered stump of a man with no one left to hold him to worldly life. He gave up his entire fortune to follow them, bringing sixty thousand brahmins with him. His wife Bhadda soon followed too, comparing herself in verse to a wild goose breaking free of its net once the rains had passed, and departed with three leagues (an ancient distance measure, roughly ten miles) of women behind her.

King Esukari, left behind, could not resist quietly claiming the wealth the priest's family had abandoned. His own chief queen confronted him with the image of vultures that gorge on carrion only to vomit it up again in order to fly free, asking him plainly whether he meant to swallow the very desires a wise man had just rejected. Struck by the comparison, the king renounced his throne that same day and joined the others with three leagues of his own court in tow.

Word of Benares emptying spread to seven neighboring kings, who abandoned their own thrones one after another on hearing it, and the renunciant company swelled to thirty leagues, with merchants leaving their shops unattended rather than stay behind.

Seeing what had unfolded, Sakka ordered the divine architect Vissakamma to raise a vast hermitage along the Ganges, stretching thirty-six leagues long, complete with leaf-huts, wells, and fruiting trees, open to anyone willing to take up the ascetic life. Hatthipala taught all who came there the four divine abidings, and the Buddha later said that teaching alone spared every one of them from rebirth in hell, as an animal, as a ghost, or as a demon.

The Buddha closed the teaching by revealing that King Esukari had been his own father, Suddhodana, in that age, and that the queen had been his mother, Mahamaya. The priest had been Kassapa and his wife Bhaddakapilani; Ajapala had been Anuruddha, Gopala had been Moggallana, and Assapala had been Sariputta. He himself had been Hatthipala, the first of the four to walk away. Jataka No. 509 of the Pali Canon's Mahanipata records the tale under this telling, offered to show that the Buddha's own final renunciation had already been rehearsed, by his own family, long before this life began.