Lakkhana Jataka

At the Bamboo Grove, Devadatta departed from the Buddha's community together with five hundred disciples he had persuaded to follow him. He had proposed five austere points of discipline meant to outbid the Buddha's own teaching in strictness. He established a separate community at Gayasisa, dividing the monastic order in two.

The Buddha sent his two chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, to recover the monks Devadatta had drawn away. Arriving at Gayasisa, the two preached the Dhamma (the Buddha's teaching) to the five hundred, instructing them in the Paths and the Fruits (the stages of awakening) until their minds opened to the teaching once again. Every one of the five hundred returned with Sariputta to the Bamboo Grove, while Devadatta's following dispersed into nothing.

When the monks praised Sariputta's complete success in contrast to Devadatta's collapse, the Buddha told them that this same pattern had played out once before in a far older existence. One party returned whole while the other lost everything. He related the Lakkhana Jataka, Jataka No. 11 of the Pali Canon, to show them how.

In that distant age, in the kingdom of Magadha near Rajagaha, the Bodhisatta was born as a stag-king who led a great herd of a thousand deer alongside his mate, Rahulamata. He had two sons, Lakkhana, meaning Lucky, and Kala, meaning Unlucky, and when the time came to divide responsibility for the herd, he entrusted five hundred deer to each son to lead and protect.

As the harvest season approached, the stag-king called his two sons to him. He warned them that peasants would soon dig pitfalls, set snares, and wait with spears along the edges of the cultivated fields to kill any deer bold enough to approach the ripening crops. He instructed both sons to withdraw their herds into the mountainous forest tracts until the harvest had been fully carried in and the danger passed.

Kala ignored his father's counsel entirely. Impatient for the sweet taste of the ripening grain, he led his five hundred deer to the very edges of the villages at dawn and again at dusk, exactly the hours when peasants kept the closest watch over their fields. The waiting villagers ambushed his herd again and again at these exposed hours, cutting his numbers down until Kala returned home utterly alone, having lost every single deer entrusted to him.

Lakkhana followed his father's instruction without deviation. He moved his herd only in the deepest part of the night, kept to hidden forest trails far from any village, and permitted his deer to graze solely on wild forest growth rather than risk the cultivated fields at all. When the harvest at last ended and the peasants took down their snares and fences, Lakkhana led all five hundred of his deer home again, every single one alive and unharmed.

Seeing his two sons return in such contrasting condition, the stag-king spoke a verse before the assembled herd: that the virtuous one who lives a disciplined and friendly way of life will prosper. Lakkhana now approached surrounded by the full company of his relatives, while Kala stood before them having lost every one of his.

The Buddha concluded by identifying the figures in the tale for the monks gathered to hear it. He himself, he said, had been the wise stag-king and father in that distant life. Lakkhana, the disciplined son who returned with his entire herd intact, had been Sariputta, while Kala, who lost everything through impatience and carelessness, had been Devadatta. The pattern the monks had just witnessed at Gayasisa, one party preserved whole through discipline and the other scattered through recklessness, was in this way shown to be no mere coincidence but the same lesson repeating itself across two very different lifetimes.

It would be easy to assume that Lakkhana himself, as the obviously wise and successful son, must be the Bodhisatta of the tale. Jataka stories so often place the Buddha-to-be in the role that models the clearest virtue. This jataka resists that assumption. The Bodhisatta here is the father, the counselor who set the standard of discipline for both sons to follow, while Lakkhana and Kala represent two different responses to counsel already given, Sariputta's faithful adherence against Devadatta's impatient disregard. The deeper teaching is not simply that wisdom succeeds and folly fails, but that a teacher's counsel, once given clearly and in good faith, places the outcome in the hands of whoever receives it.

Both Lakkhana and Kala received the identical warning from their father, at the identical time, framed in the identical terms. Neither brother could claim ignorance of the danger or confusion about what caution required of him. Sariputta and Devadatta, after all, had each heard the same Dhamma yet answered it in opposite ways.