Mahā-Panāda Jātaka

In the town of Bhaddiya, a rich merchant's son heard the Buddha preach. Moved to the depths of his heart, he left the household life and entered the Order as the monk Bhaddaji. He applied himself to insight with full diligence. He soon attained arahantship (the state of one fully liberated from craving and rebirth), and with it mastery of the higher psychic powers (iddhi) that the Pali Canon records as the fruit of deep concentration.

Some time later the Buddha set out with a great company of monks toward a village called Koti. The road crossed a wide stretch of the Ganges. As the company passed over the water, the Buddha knew well what lay hidden in the riverbed below. He asked Elder Bhaddaji whether he remembered the palace that had sunk there in ages past and now lay forgotten beneath the current.

By his command of psychic power, Bhaddaji reached down into the river. He drew the ancient, submerged palace up out of the water, balancing its entire mass upon a single finger. Fish and tortoises, water-snakes and frogs had long made their home within its flooded halls. They came tumbling from its windows and doorways as it rose into the light. Before the whole company, he lifted it a league into the air, then two leagues, then three, holding the ancient wonder suspended above the current. Only when the Buddha told him it was enough did he let it sink back beneath the waves.

Astonished at what they had seen, the monks asked the Buddha whose palace this had been, and what story lay behind it. The Buddha told them it had once been the royal palace of King Mahā-Panāda, in which that king himself had dwelt. To confirm the truth of it for the assembly, he spoke these verses, describing a dwelling raised by merit beyond anything built by human hands: a golden hall sixteen in breadth and a thousand bowshots tall, five-and-twenty leagues by the reckoning of those who measure such things. Its hundred storeys hung about with banners of living emerald green. There six thousand musicians, gathered in seven companies, once played and danced without ceasing.

Then the Buddha completed the account for the assembled monks: "Bhaddaji, the king you saw sunk beneath this river was none other than you, in a birth now long past. And I myself, in that same existence, was Sakka, king of the gods, who came to that king's side and served him there." With this, the identification of the birth was made plain. Bhaddaji was King Mahā-Panāda, and the Buddha himself had been Sakka.

The Jātakaṭṭhakathā is the great commentary on the Pali Canon's Jātaka book. It presents this episode, Jātaka No. 264 of the Khuddaka Nikāya, part of the Tika-Nipāta or "Book of Threes," chiefly as the setting for Elder Bhaddaji's feat of psychic power. It is not offered as the full history of King Mahā-Panāda's life. Its three closing verses exist only to confirm, in the Buddha's own words, that the sunken palace and the royal boy-king who once lived in it were real. Bhaddaji's attainment had let the assembly see a fragment of that distant age with their own eyes. The commentary itself says plainly that the rest of the story belongs elsewhere. How Mahā-Panāda came to be born at all, how his glittering palace first rose at Sakka's own command, and how, as a young prince, the whole court labored for seven years before anyone could make him smile — all this is told in full in the Suruci Jātaka, the birth-story of his father, King Suruci of Mithilā.

Even without its fuller history, the episode carries its own quiet teaching. A palace once filled with six thousand musicians and crowned with a hundred storeys of emerald had been raised by merit too vast for ordinary craftsmen to equal. In time it sank beneath a common river. It became home to nothing grander than frogs and water-snakes, unknown to anyone who walked along its banks. Only a single monk's purified mind lifted it, for a few brief moments, back into the sun. What merit raises to such heights, time still returns to the water. Only the freedom the Buddha taught does not sink again.