Kāya-vicchinda Jātaka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana about a certain man. There was a man at Sāvatthī who was tormented by jaundice. The doctors had given him up as a hopeless case, and his wife and son wondered who could be found to cure him. The man thought that if he could get rid of the disease, he would take to the religious life. Some days later he took something that did him good, and he got well.

The man went to Jetavana and asked for admission into the Order. He received the lesser and greater ordinations from the Master. Before long he attained sainthood. One day the monks were talking together in the Hall of Truth. They said that this man had jaundice, vowed that if he got well he would embrace the religious life, did so, and had now attained sainthood.

The Buddha came in and asked what they were discussing, sitting there together. They told him. He said, "Brothers, this is not the only man who has done so." Long ago, he said, wise people who recovered from sickness embraced the religious life and secured their own advantage. Then he told an old-world tale, recorded as No. 293 in the Jātaka collection.

Once, when Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a Brahmin family. He grew up and began to amass wealth. Then he fell sick of jaundice. Even the physicians could do nothing for him, and his wife and family were in despair.

The Bodhisatta resolved that if he ever got well, he would embrace the religious life. He took something that did him good, and he recovered. He did not delay or find reasons to remain at home. He went away to the Himalaya and became an ascetic.

There he cultivated the faculties and the attainments, and he dwelt in ecstatic happiness. He thought that for all this time he had been without this great happiness. The text does not describe the Himalaya or his dwelling in detail. What it gives is the discovery itself, that the peace he had found through meditation was something he had lacked in all his years of acquiring wealth.

He breathed out an aspiration in verse. In the first stanza he describes himself as smitten down by a direful illness, lying in utter torment and affliction, his body quickly withering like a flower laid in the sun on the dust to dry. In another stanza he says that the noble seems ignoble and the impure seems pure, and that one who is blind finds a sink of foulness beautiful. Then he says, "Shame on that sickly body, shame, I say, loathsome, impure, and full of foul decay!" He adds that when fools are indolent they fail to win a new birth in heaven and wander from the way.

The text says that the Great Being (an epithet for the Bodhisatta, the being who would in a future life become the Buddha) reflected, in various ways, on the body's impurity and its constant vulnerability to disease. Disgusted with the body and all its parts, he cultivated the four excellent conditions of life throughout his days. At the end of his life he was reborn in Brahma's world, one of the higher heavenly realms. The story is not a lesson about the cruelty of illness. It is about what a person may do with illness once it has shown how fragile the body is.

When the Master had ended this discourse, he proclaimed the Truths. Many attained the fruition of the First Path (stream-entry, the first stage of awakening on the road to enlightenment). Then he identified the Birth: "At that time I myself was the ascetic."

The Kāya-vicchinda Jātaka, No. 293, is built around the moment when sickness opens a person's eyes. Both the man of Sāvatthī and the Brahmin of the past made a plain promise at their lowest point and then kept it when they were well. The verses treat the body with honest, unsoftened language, but their purpose is not to inspire hatred. It is to loosen the grip of attachment and to remind the listener that indolence wastes the very chance that illness points to. The Bodhisatta's discovery in the Himalaya is that real happiness was available all along. A well person can learn this without waiting for a fever to show it, and a sick person can find that the vow made on the sickbed is the beginning of a better life.