Mahāsupina Jātaka

Jataka No. 77 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha at Jetavana monastery. King Pasenadi of Kosala had woken in the night drenched in sweat, shaken by sixteen strange and ominous dreams he could make no sense of on his own.

Among the dreams that had troubled the king's sleep were black bulls locked in combat though no rain fell to account for any disturbance, and young trees bearing fruit before they had grown old enough to flower. He had also dreamed of cows contentedly drinking milk from their own newly born calves, and of lean, broken-down oxen fed well while fine, strong horses were given nothing but chaff. A golden bowl set out for royal use was instead licked clean by a common jackal, and a pond of sweet lotuses was slowly choked by foul, creeping mud.

Shaken and fearing for his crown, King Pasenadi summoned his court brahmins at first light. They declared without hesitation that the dreams foretold disaster for his reign, unless thousands of bulls, horses, and other animals were slaughtered at once in a grand sacrifice to turn the omens aside.

Queen Mallika was uneasy at a solution that asked for so much death to answer a handful of dreams. She urged her husband to set the brahmins' counsel aside and instead bring his visions directly to the Buddha at Jetavana, trusting that the one who saw all things clearly would need no slaughtered animal to see the truth of a dream.

The king set out for Jetavana and laid his sixteen dreams before the Buddha exactly as he had received them. Rather than offer a reading of his own detached from any history, the Buddha answered with a story from a far older time, when a different king had once woken from the very same dreams.

In that distant age, a king of Benares named Brahmadatta had dreamed precisely what Pasenadi now dreamed. His own brahmins gave him the same counsel Pasenadi's had just given: a wide sacrifice of living creatures to turn aside whatever doom the dreams foretold. Preparations for the slaughter began at once, and a great multitude of animals was gathered to be killed at the king's command.

Among the brahmins assembled for the sacrifice was a young and learned man who could not accept what his elders were preparing to do. He argued that the taking of so many lives could never be reconciled with the very scriptures the priests themselves claimed to uphold, and that true wisdom could not possibly demand blood as its price.

Possessed of deep insight through his own ascetic practice, the Bodhisatta, then living as a hermit in the Himalayas, perceived from afar the slaughter about to unfold in Benares and resolved that it must not go forward unanswered. He traveled through the air and took his seat in the king's own park. The young brahmin, encountering him there, recognized at once a teacher capable of giving the king a truer answer than any sacrifice could offer.

The young brahmin brought King Brahmadatta to the hermit in the park. The king set aside the preparations already under way and related his sixteen dreams in full, trusting that this unexpected visitor might see in them something his own priests had missed entirely.

The Bodhisatta heard each of the king's dreams in turn and explained them fully to the king's satisfaction. Every vision, he showed, pointed not to any danger threatening Brahmadatta's own reign, but to the character of ages yet to come. In those distant eras, he said, rulers would grow unjust, ministers corrupt, and ordinary people careless of the very virtues that now kept the king's own realm at peace. Relieved beyond measure, Brahmadatta called off the sacrifice entirely and set every gathered animal free unharmed.

Having finished the old story, the Buddha turned back to Pasenadi. His own sixteen dreams, the Buddha showed him, carried exactly the same meaning the hermit had once given Brahmadatta: warnings addressed to a distant future, not to the king now standing before him. Pasenadi, hearing this, abandoned the sacrifice his own brahmins had urged and freed every animal that had been gathered for slaughter in his name.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified King Brahmadatta with Ananda, and the young brahmin who had refused to let the sacrifice proceed unquestioned with Sariputta. The same courage to stand against needless killing, and the same patient wisdom to answer fear with understanding rather than blood, had carried forward unbroken. It passed from that ancient court in Benares to the park at Jetavana, where a second king's sixteen dreams finally found their rest.