Maṅgala Jātaka

The Master told this story at the Bamboo Grove about a brahmin skilled in prognostications drawn from pieces of cloth. The tradition says that this brahmin lived at Rājagaha, held false views, and did not believe in the Three Gems (the Buddha, his teaching, and the monastic community). He was rich and wealthy. The Jātaka Aṭṭhakathā of the Pali Canon records the story as No. 87, the Maṅgala Jātaka.

A female mouse had gnawed a suit of clothes that lay in a chest in his house. One day after bathing he called for the suit and was told about the damage. He thought that the clothes would bring ill luck if they stayed in the house. He decided that no child or servant could be given them, since whoever wore them would bring misfortune on all around. He also feared that a servant might keep them and ruin his house.

The brahmin decided that his son must carry the clothes to the charnel ground and throw them away. He told the son to take them on a stick without touching them with his hand, and then to bathe all over before returning. That morning at dawn, the Master looked about to see whom he could lead to the truth. He saw that the father and son were destined to gain salvation. He went in the guise of a hunter to the charnel ground and sat at the entrance.

The young brahmin soon arrived, carrying the clothes on the end of his stick as though they were a house snake. The Master asked what he was doing. The youth said that the clothes had been gnawed by mice and were like ill-luck itself, and that his father had sent him to throw them away. The Master told him to throw them down. When he did, the Master picked them up before the young man's eyes, saying that they would suit him well. He ignored the earnest warnings and went back toward the Bamboo Grove.

The young brahmin ran home and told his father. The father thought that the clothes were bewitched and that even the sage Gotama could not wear them without destruction. He also feared the disrepute that would fall on him. He resolved to give the sage many other garments and to ask him to throw that suit away. He went with a large number of robes to the Bamboo Grove, with his son.

The brahmin asked whether it was true that the Master had picked up a suit in the charnel ground. The Master said it was. The brahmin warned that the cloth was accursed and would destroy him, and offered other clothes instead. The Master replied that he had left the world and was content with rags taken from roadsides, bathing places, dust-heaps, and charnel grounds. Then he told the brahmin that he had held his superstitions in times past as well as now. At the brahmin's request, he told an old tale.

Once there reigned at Rājagaha in Magadha a righteous king. In those days the Bodhisatta was born as a brahmin of the north-west. When he grew up, he went forth as an ascetic, won the Knowledges and Attainments (spiritual powers and meditative states gained through his practice), and went to the Himalayas. Returning, he stayed in the king's pleasure garden, and the king invited him to take his meals at the palace. So the Bodhisatta lived in the garden and ate at the palace.

In that city lived a brahmin known as Cloth-omens, who also had a chest of clothes gnawed by mice. Everything happened as in the foregoing story. When the son set out for the charnel ground, the Bodhisatta arrived first and sat at the gate. He picked up the suit the young brahmin threw away and returned to the garden. The old brahmin cried that it would be the death of the king's ascetic, and begged him to throw it away.

The Bodhisatta answered that rags thrown away in charnel grounds were good enough for him. He said that he had no belief in superstitions about luck, which are not approved by Buddhas, Pacceka Buddhas (those who reach enlightenment alone and do not teach others), or Bodhisattas. For that reason, he added, no wise man ought to be a believer in luck. Hearing the truth, the brahmin gave up his errors and took refuge in the Bodhisatta. The Bodhisatta preserved his insight unbroken and was reborn in the Brahma Realm.

Having told the story, the Master taught the brahmin in a stanza. It says that whoever renounces omens, dreams, and signs is freed from superstition's errors, and will overcome the paired depravities and the attachments to the end of time. After preaching it, he went on to teach the Four Truths. At the close, the brahmin and his son attained the first path.

The Master identified the birth by saying that the father and son of the present were also the father and son of that earlier time. He himself, he said, had been the ascetic.

The story shows how fear of a mere object can grow until it governs a household. The cloth had no power, yet the family was ready to expel it, to bathe after touching it, and to protect a sage from it. The Master's calm answer, repeated across two lives, treats the cloth as plain cloth. In No. 87 the point is not that rags are praiseworthy, but that a mind free of omens is free of needless dread. The same freedom remains open to anyone who looks closely at what he fears.