Lohakumbhi Jataka

At Jetavana, King Pasenadi of Kosala lay awake one night when he heard four terrible cries pierce the darkness: "Du!", "Sa!", "Na!", "So!" Shaken, he summoned his household brahmins at daybreak, and they told him the cries were an omen threatening his kingdom, his wealth, or his very life. This danger, they insisted, could only be averted through a great fourfold sacrifice of animals and captives bound to the slaughtering posts.

Before the king could order the sacrifice prepared, Queen Mallika urged him to consult the Buddha rather than trust the brahmins alone. Pasenadi went to the Buddha at Jetavana and described the four cries exactly as he had heard them. The Buddha told him plainly that nothing at all would befall him, explaining that certain beings suffering in hell had simply cried out in their agony. He then related a story from an earlier age to show the king how a king before him had once faced this very same fear.

In that earlier age, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta had renounced the pleasures of the world and lived as an ascetic of great power in the Himalayas. He would occasionally appear like a figure of gold in the pleasure garden kept for the king's own use. The king of that time heard the identical four cries in the night and, just as Pasenadi would later do, turned to his household priest for an explanation.

The royal priest declared that only a fourfold sacrifice of creatures could ward off the disaster the cries foretold, and the king ordered his victims bound at the slaughtering posts to await the blades. Among the priest's own students, one young disciple could not accept this answer and asked his teacher directly whether the Vedas themselves taught that happiness could ever come to those who killed living creatures for their own safety. His teacher had no answer that satisfied him and dismissed the question outright.

Unwilling to let the matter rest, the young disciple wandered into the royal garden, where he came upon the golden-hued ascetic the Bodhisatta had become. Recognizing in him someone who might know what the priest did not, the young man persuaded the king to abandon the sacrifice for the moment and bring the ascetic before the throne to explain the terrible cries himself.

Before the king and his court, the Bodhisatta revealed that the cries belonged to no omen threatening the living. Four princes from near Benares, he explained, had once committed adultery with other men's carefully guarded wives. For that offense they had been reborn after death inside four iron cauldrons of molten metal in Lohakumbhi, a hell realm of torment far beneath the earth. For thirty thousand years each had sunk to the cauldron's floor and risen again through the boiling liquid. Only now, after all that time, had each finally reached the rim long enough to attempt a single verse of lament, managing only its first syllable before the burning froth dragged him under again.

The Bodhisatta then completed what each tormented voice had been unable to finish. "Du" began a verse confessing that they had given no due share of their wealth and had lived an evil life, finding no safe refuge in joys now long since fled. "Sa" began a lament for suffering that found no release, enduring torment that showed no sign of ending across countless ages. "Na" began a confession that their sufferings were without end, since the ills they had done on earth were now theirs alone to pay for. "So" began a final hope that, upon at last passing forth from that place, each would attain human birth again and rise through virtue to many deeds of worth.

Hearing the full account of what the cries truly meant, the king understood that no catastrophe threatened his throne or his kingdom at all. He ordered every bound captive and animal released at once, had the slaughtering posts torn down, and turned from that day forward toward generosity and the five precepts of ordinary virtue.

The Buddha concluded his telling by identifying the figures in the tale for Pasenadi. The young disciple who had refused to accept his teacher's justification for slaughter, he said, had been Sariputta in that distant life, and the ascetic who revealed the truth behind the four cries had been the Buddha himself.

It is tempting to treat the Bodhisatta's explanation as the whole point of the tale, since it is his verses that resolve the mystery and save hundreds of lives. Yet nothing in the story reaches him without the student's refusal to accept an authority's convenient answer. The young disciple had no special wisdom of his own, no verses to recite, and no power to see into hell. He had only the willingness to ask a question his own teacher found inconvenient, and to keep searching once that teacher dismissed him. The jataka honors this searching as its own kind of courage, inseparable from the wisdom that eventually answered it.

The jataka draws a quiet distinction between the four cries and the catastrophe the brahmins invented around them. The cries themselves were real, the genuine suffering of beings in torment reaching however faintly into the world of the living, yet they carried no threat whatsoever to the king who heard them. The true danger in the tale was never the sound in the night but the fear it produced, and the readiness of self-interested advisors to convert that fear into a sacrifice serving their own appetites rather than any real necessity. This was a pattern the Buddha exposed in Pasenadi's own court just as the Bodhisatta had once exposed it in Brahmadatta's.