Mahakapi Jataka

At Jetavana, the monks spoke of how Devadatta, a monk who repeatedly tried to harm the Buddha out of rivalry, had once flung a stone at the Buddha. The Buddha told them this was not the first time; the very same man had thrown a stone at him once before, in a far older life, and he told the whole of that older story.

In that former age, a brahmin farmer from Kasi went into the forest searching for lost oxen and wandered seven days without food. Spotting a fruit tree growing over the edge of a cliff, he climbed out onto it to eat, slipped, and fell sixty cubits (roughly ninety feet) into a pit as dark and deep as hell itself. There he lay for ten more days with no way to climb out.

A great monkey living nearby heard his cries and came to the edge of the pit. Before attempting anything, the monkey tested his own strength by practicing with a heavy stone, making certain he could truly bear a grown man's weight up such a height before risking the climb. Satisfied, he descended into the pit, lifted the starving farmer onto his back, and climbed back out to safety.

Exhausted from the effort, the monkey asked only to rest beside the man he had just saved, warning him that wild animals prowled the forest and asking to be watched over while he slept. As the monkey slept, the farmer, still half-starved and newly aware of how much meat a monkey's body might offer a hungry traveler, picked up a stone and struck him as hard as he could, meaning to kill him.

Wounded and bleeding but not killed outright, the monkey climbed out of reach into the trees. He understood at once that the farmer, left alone, would never find his own way out of the forest. So he leaped from branch to branch ahead of him, keeping just enough distance to stay safe while calling down directions, leading his own attacker step by step until the cultivated fields near Benares came into view.

The farmer was struck with leprosy and wandered in pain for seven full years before reaching the Migacira park near Benares, where the king of that city found him and asked what had brought him to such suffering. The farmer told the whole story himself, confessing his own ingratitude and treachery without being made to. The moment his confession ended, the earth opened beneath him and swallowed him into hell.

The Buddha closed the teaching by naming the treacherous farmer as Devadatta. He revealed that he himself had been the monkey king who saved him, guided him home while bleeding from his own wound, and asked nothing in return but safe passage for a man who had tried to kill him. Jataka No. 516 of the Pali Canon records the tale under this telling.

The monkey's decision to practice with a stone before ever descending into the pit is easy to read past, yet it marks him as something more deliberate than merely compassionate on impulse. He did not simply act on feeling and hope his strength would prove sufficient partway up a sixty-cubit climb with another creature's full weight on his back. He confirmed his own capacity first, precisely so that his compassion would not collapse halfway up the cliff and cost both of them their lives.

Nothing about the monkey's response to being struck involved calculating what the farmer deserved in return. He did not reason that a man capable of this violence had forfeited any claim to further help. He simply recognized that an abandoned farmer would die in the forest regardless of what he had just done, and treated that fact as reason enough to keep guiding him. The jataka does not present this as superhuman restraint so much as a refusal to let someone else's cruelty decide the shape of his own next action.

By the time the farmer reached the king's park seven years later, covered in the visible proof of his own punishment, no one was demanding he explain himself. He told the whole story anyway, including the parts that made him look worst, as though the leprosy alone had not yet finished the account he owed. The earth's judgment came only after his own words had already convicted him, suggesting that the confession itself, however late, was something the story still considered necessary to complete.