Kamanita Jataka

The Buddha told this Jātaka, No. 228 of the Pali Jataka Nikaya, at Jetavana concerning a brahmin named Kāmanīta who lived at Sāvatthi. The brahmin had cleared land on the bank of the Aciravatī river to farm it, and the Buddha, passing on his alms round, spoke kindly with him and encouraged him at each stage of the work. On the day of sowing the brahmin vowed to give generous alms to the Sangha, with the Buddha at its head, once the crop ripened. But on the eve of the harvest a heavy storm upstream sent a flood that washed the whole crop away to the sea, and the brahmin went home weeping.

The Buddha visited his house, reminded him that what is lost cannot be recovered by grieving, and taught the discourse on Kāma (sensual desire); the brahmin was established in stream-entry. Later, when the monks praised this in the Dhamma Hall, the Buddha said he had eased this man's grief before, and told the old story of a king of Benares who had suffered from the very same disease of wanting.

In the city of Benares, the elder of two royal brothers reigned as king, ruled by greed for wealth and sensual pleasure. Sakka, king of the gods and the Bodhisatta in this birth, saw this craving from heaven and resolved to humble the king. Taking the form of a young brahmin, he came before the king and told him that he could win for him three prosperous cities — Uttarapañcāla, Indapatta, and Kekaka. The king, dazzled by the prospect of ruling over all three, agreed to march the next day.

Rather than settling the matter at once, the king arranged to set out the next day, and in the meantime gave the young man neither lodging for the night nor any payment for his trouble.

When the king ordered the young brahmin summoned, no one could find him; he had simply vanished, and with him the promise of three new cities. The king was plunged into despair, crying out, "What glory has been snatched from me!" His grief over a conquest he had never actually possessed settled into his body as a wasting dysentery that none of the court physicians could cure, however they tried.

Sakka looked down again and saw the king of Benares consumed by this strange sickness of unfulfilled greed. Taking on the form of a brahmin physician, he came to the king's side and offered to cure him without asking any fee.

The king confessed his trouble to the physician, explaining that his illness had come from hearing of the lost cities and from his own covetousness, and he put it in a verse of his own. He wanted the three forts built high upon their mounts, and since he could not have them, he begged to be cured — "cure me, O brahmin, me the slave of greed."

Sakka answered him with a verse that drew the line between what medicine could and could not touch: "There are who cure the bite of a black snake; the wise can heal the wounds that goblins make. The slave of greed no doctor can make whole; what cure is there for the backsliding soul?" A snake's venom and a goblin's curse, he meant, yield to the physician's art, but the fever of wanting answers to no such remedy.

Sakka then reasoned the king out of his own desire. Even if he were given all three cities at once, he could not wear four robes together, nor eat from four dishes at a single sitting, nor sleep in four beds in the same night. Whatever lay beyond what one body could actually use was no true gain at all, only a burden carried for its own sake. Desire, he warned, is the root of all evil, and those who cherish it fall into the great and lesser hells.

Hearing this, the king understood at last that desire is the root from which every kind of evil grows, and that chasing after what could never be used, let alone enjoyed, was itself the sickness. As his mind let go of the craving, his body recovered from the dysentery that had gripped it. Sakka established him in virtue and returned to the heavens, and from that time on the king gave alms freely and did good deeds with a generous and settled heart.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha revealed that the lustful brahmin Kāmanīta, the one enslaved to desire, had in that ancient birth been the king of Benares. He himself, the Buddha said, had been Sakka, who first came to him as a young brahmin and then returned as a physician.

The Kāmanīta Jātaka does not claim that wanting more is foolish only when the thing wanted is modest. It shows a king brought low by craving for an entire kingdom he had never even held. He was cured not by any physician's art but by a plain arithmetic of real need. What outlasts the three vanished cities is that simple reckoning: that desire measured against what a single life can actually use very often finds itself holding nothing at all.