Hamsa Jataka

At the Bamboo Grove, monks were praising Ananda for trying to shield the Buddha when Devadatta sent the elephant Nalagiri against him. The Buddha told them this was not the first time Ananda had risked his own life on his behalf, and recounted a story from a far older age to show exactly how far back that loyalty reached.

In that former age, King Bahuputtaka of Benares had a queen, Khema, who longed to hear a golden goose teach the Dhamma with her own ears. Learning that such geese lived on Mount Cittakuta, the king consulted his wisest brahmins and built an entire lake three leagues across (a league being roughly three miles), stocked with grain and lotuses and proclaimed safe for any bird that came. He placed a fowler named Khemaka to watch over it.

Over time, geese of many kinds found their way to the lake, until word of it finally reached Dhatarattha, the Bodhisatta, king of the golden geese and his flock of ninety thousand on Cittakuta. Dhatarattha suspected at once that a sanctuary built by human hands so conveniently might be a trap, since men were skilled at exactly this kind of deception. His own flock pressed him so insistently to visit, though, that he agreed against his better judgment.

For six days the flock fed there without incident, but on the seventh Khemaka set a snare of horsehair at the very spot where Dhatarattha came to feed. Caught fast, the goose-king chose not to cry out at once. He endured the pain of the snare in silence until the rest of his flock had finished their meal undisturbed, unwilling to let his own danger cut short their safety a moment early.

When Dhatarattha finally called out and the flock scattered in panic, his deputy Sumukha alone turned back and searched until he found his captured king. He refused every urging to save himself, declaring that he would share whatever fate awaited his lord rather than survive through desertion.

Rather than simply waiting beside Dhatarattha in silence, Sumukha flew directly to meet Khemaka as he approached, speaking respectfully of the captured king's virtues and worth before the hunter had even reached the snare. Moved by what he heard, Khemaka found his resolve to simply kill or sell his catch shaken, and Sumukha returned to his king's side to encourage him through whatever came next.

Khemaka brought both geese before King Bahuputtaka, who had them set upon a golden perch and offered honey and sweetened water rather than any harm. The king asked first whether his own realm was governed justly, and Dhatarattha, satisfied by what he heard, answered with five verses of counsel on virtue, wisdom, and the proper conduct expected of a king and his sons.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming Sariputta as King Bahuputtaka, and the nun Khema, who by coincidence shared her name with the queen in the old tale, as that very queen who had first longed for the teaching. Channa, he said, had been the hunter Khemaka. Ananda, he said, had been the deputy Sumukha, and the Buddha himself had been Dhatarattha, the goose-king whose life Sumukha had refused to abandon even for a moment. Jataka No. 502 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

Dhatarattha's own suspicion of the lake turned out to be entirely correct, and yet it saved nobody, since his flock's insistence overruled his better judgment before the trap was ever sprung. The story does not treat his initial reluctance as a moment of failed leadership; it simply shows that even a king who sees danger clearly cannot always hold a whole flock back from choosing it anyway. What mattered in the end was not having avoided the snare but how both he and Sumukha met it once it had already closed.

Dhatarattha's choice to endure the snare without crying out was not stoicism for its own sake. He waited specifically so his flock could finish feeding undisturbed, treating their continued safety as worth more than shortening his own pain by even a few minutes. This single choice, made before anyone else even knew he was caught, set the pattern that Sumukha would then carry forward in his own refusal to abandon his king once the danger became known to everyone.

Sumukha's devotion is easy to picture as simple grief or stubborn refusal to leave, but the story gives him something more active to do than wait and mourn. He met the hunter directly and spoke on his king's behalf before any blow could fall, turning loyalty into persuasion rather than letting it end in silent sacrifice. It was this combination, a willingness to stay joined to a willingness to act, that reached Khemaka's heart and changed what might otherwise have been a simple kill.