Kumbhakara Jataka

At Jetavana, the Buddha, who was said to watch over his disciples three times each night and three times each day, sensed that five hundred monks had fallen into lustful thought as midnight approached. He gathered them and taught that even a small wrong, left unchecked, grows into great ruin. He then told them how the wise of an older age had overcome far subtler temptations than theirs and become Paccekabuddhas through nothing more than careful attention to an ordinary sight.

In that former age, four kings ruled four great realms of Jambudvipa (the continent of India, in Buddhist cosmology), each living in the full comfort his throne provided. King Karandu of Dantapura watched his own courtiers strip a laden mango tree bare in a single morning while a neighboring tree, bearing no fruit at all, stood untouched and serene. Recognizing in that one sight how possession invites ruin while having nothing invites peace, he renounced his throne on the spot.

King Naggaji of Roruka noticed that bracelets worn alone made no sound at all, but clashed and jangled the moment a second was added to the first. Seeing in this the whole difference between solitude and the friction of company, he gave up his own crown. King Nimi of Mithila watched a hawk carrying a scrap of meat torn at by an entire flock of other birds until it finally dropped its prize and found peace the instant it let go. Understanding that grasping itself invited the suffering, he renounced the five pleasures of the senses. King Dummukha of Kampilla watched two bulls gore each other bloody over a single cow until one lay dying, and seeing desire carried all the way to its deadly conclusion, he turned from the throne as well. Each king, through nothing more than a moment of real attention, became a Paccekabuddha, one who awakens to the truth alone, without becoming a teaching Buddha.

In that same age, the Bodhisatta lived as a potter in Benares with his wife, Bhaggavi, and their young son and daughter, earning an honest living at the wheel and kiln. When the four Paccekabuddhas, now living in the Nandamula cave of the Himalayas, flew down together to beg for alms, it was the potter's own door they stopped at. He and his wife fed them gladly, and when he asked what had led each of them to renunciation, all four recited the verses of their own awakening in turn.

Moved by what he heard, the potter told his wife plainly that he saw no further reason to keep living as a householder earning his bread by labor. His wife answered as though she shared his resolve completely, then quietly deceived him. She told him she was only going to fetch water, then slipped away to be ordained by the very sages who had just eaten at their table, leaving her husband to discover her absence only afterward.

Rather than follow her immediately, the potter stayed to raise their son and daughter himself. He deliberately cooked their rice wrong in every way he could think of, raw, undercooked, scorched, oversalted, undersalted, until both children had learned on their own exactly what properly prepared food required and could manage their own household without him. Only once he was certain they could stand on their own did he, too, seek ordination.

Sometime later, his wife, now an ascetic herself, came upon him and accused him of having abandoned their children. The potter answered her plainly: he had waited until the children could understand such things for themselves before he left, while she had shown no such care for them at all when she slipped away over a pretext of fetching water.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming the daughter as Uppalavanna, the son as Rahula, the wife who had once deceived her husband as Rahula's own mother, and the potter himself as the Buddha in an earlier life. Jataka No. 408 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling, given to five hundred monks as proof that renunciation taken seriously asks not only honesty with oneself but responsibility toward whoever depends on that honesty landing at the right time.