Matarodana Jātaka

The Matarodana Jataka, numbered 317 in the Pali collection and recorded in the Jataka Atthakatha (the traditional commentary that preserves the stories' prose frame), was told by the Buddha at Jetavana. It concerns a landowner who lived at Savatthi. When his brother died, he was so overwhelmed by grief that he neither ate, nor washed, nor anointed himself. At daybreak each day he went to the cemetery to weep.

Early one morning the Master looked out over the world and saw in this man the capacity to attain the fruition of the First Path (the first stage of awakening, also called stream-entry). He thought that no one but himself could ease the man's grief by telling him what had happened long ago. So in the afternoon, after his alms round, he took a junior monk and went to the landowner's house. The man had a seat prepared, saluted the Master, and sat down to one side.

The Master asked why he was grieving, and the man said he had sorrowed ever since his brother died. The Master answered that all compound existences are impermanent, and what is to be broken is broken. Wise men of old, knowing this, had not grieved when a brother died. At the man's request, the Master then told the story of the past.

Once, when Brahmadatta was reigning in Benares, the Bodhisatta was reborn in the family of a rich merchant who was worth eighty crores. When he came of age, his parents died. A brother of the Bodhisatta then managed the family estate, and the Bodhisatta lived in dependence on him.

In time the brother also died of a fatal disease. His relatives, friends and companions gathered, threw up their arms, and wept and lamented. No one could control his feelings. The Bodhisatta alone neither lamented nor wept.

People noticed this and said he was hard-hearted. They said that he did not even pull a wry face at his brother's death, and they suspected that he had wished for it in order to enjoy a double portion. His kinsfolk also reproved him for not shedding a tear. The blame was sharp, and it came from people who were themselves in pain.

On hearing them, the Bodhisatta answered calmly. He said that in their blind folly, not knowing the Eight Worldly Conditions (the paired fortunes of gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, pleasure and pain that every life passes through), they wept and cried that a brother was dead. Yet he too, and they also, would have to die. Why then did they not weep at the thought of their own death? All existing things are transient, he said, and no single compound is able to remain in its natural state. Since they wept in ignorance, he asked, why should he weep?

He then spoke three stanzas. The first says to weep for the living rather than the dead, since all who take a mortal form, beast, bird, serpent, man or angel, tread the same path. The second asks why a man powerless against fate should shed idle tears over a brother. The third says that those who are worldly-wise but ignorant of what is right may hold wisdom itself to be foolishness. Thus the Bodhisatta taught them the truth and freed them all from their sorrow.

When the Master ended his exposition, he revealed the Truths. At the end of the Truths the landowner attained the fruition of the First Path. Then the Master identified the birth: the wise man who had delivered people from their sorrow was he himself. The man who had come to the cemetery each dawn no longer needed to go there to be consoled.

The Jataka does not scold the grieving. Grief is treated as real, and the Buddha goes to the mourner's own house to meet it. Yet the story also refuses to let sorrow stand as the last word. The Bodhisatta's calm is not coldness. It rests on seeing clearly that death comes to every being, and that tears cannot undo it. His advice to turn compassion toward the living gives grief a use: the love one felt for the dead can be carried into care for those still here. That is a comfort that does not depend on pretending nothing was lost.