Mittavinda Jātaka

This story was told by the Teacher while dwelling at Jetavana, concerning a wayward monk who clung stubbornly to his own judgment and would not receive the correction of his fellows. When the monks reported his conduct, the Teacher said, 'This is not the first time his unruliness has brought him to grief,' and told this story of the past, preserved in the Pali Canon as Jātaka No. 104 of the Ekanipāta, the Book of Ones.

In the days of Kassapa Buddha, there lived in Benares a merchant of eighty crores whose son was named Mittavindaka. Though his mother had entered the First Path and longed to see her son walk the Dhamma, Mittavindaka was coarse and faithless from birth. After his father died, she pressed him toward virtue the only way she could: on an Uposatha day she promised him a thousand pieces of money if he would keep the precepts and sit through the Dhamma teaching at the monastery. He went, but slept through the entire discourse, heard nothing, and collected his payment regardless. Trading that seed money with a merchant's cunning, he soon amassed two million pieces of his own, wealth built on empty observance rather than true devotion.

Flush with riches, Mittavindaka resolved to join an ocean trading voyage. His mother begged him to stay, reminding him their household already held wealth enough for several lifetimes and that the sea devoured the unwary. He would not be moved; when she clung to him to bar his way, he struck her down and stepped over her to board the ship. On the seventh day at sea, the vessel stopped dead in the water as though chained to the ocean floor. The sailors cast lots three times to find the one whose evil deed had cursed the voyage, and three times the lot fell on Mittavindaka. Unwilling to let the whole crew perish for one man's sake, they set him adrift on a bamboo raft, and the ship sailed on the instant he was gone.

Carried by the current, Mittavindaka's raft came to an island where a crystal palace sheltered four radiant nymphs, survivors of a thin merit that still clung to him from his feigned Uposatha. For seven days he lived among them in bliss, until restlessness drove him onward to a silver palace with eight nymphs, then a palace of jewels with sixteen, and at last a golden palace with thirty-two. Each dwelling surpassed the one before it, and each time his hunger only sharpened. Leaving the last palace behind, he sailed into grim waters until he came upon the ramparts of a walled city, which he took for the capital of the gods.

It was in truth the Ussada Hell, a realm of iron reckoning where past deeds return as ongoing torment. There Mittavindaka found a tormented being with a razor-edged wheel spinning on his skull, carving it to the bone. Blinded by the same greed that had carried him past four palaces, Mittavindaka saw only a wheel of lotus petals crowning the sufferer's head. 'Friend,' he called out, 'give me that lotus you wear!' The tormented being, overjoyed that his sentence had run its course, cast the wheel upon him gladly. It clamped onto Mittavindaka's skull at once, grinding into bone. Then the Bodhisatta, who had taken birth as a Deva, looked down and spoke: 'From four he went to eight, from eight to sixteen, and from sixteen to thirty-two. So greed unchecked devours the one it drives, until the wheel it bred comes home to rest upon his head.' Having spoken, the Deva returned to his own heaven, leaving Mittavindaka to bear the wheel until his evil karma was spent.

His lesson ended, the Teacher identified the birth: 'This unruly monk of today was that Mittavindaka, and I myself was the Deva.'

This Jātaka exemplifies Sīla, the perfection of moral discipline, through a son whose violence toward the mother who bore him outweighs every fortune he gathers, whether by trade or through the fleeting favor of nymphs. His almsgiving was never discipline at all, only a transaction performed for coin, and discipline that is bought rather than kept cannot shield anyone from its own undoing. The very figure of Mittavindaka and his razor wheel return in Jātaka No. 82 of the Ekanipāta and Jātaka No. 369 of the Pañcanipāta, each addressed to a different wayward monk and each ending differently, one with a single verse from a distant king of the Devas, the other with a young deva's direct questioning before the wheel falls. Here, in the oldest and plainest of the three, the Deva speaks once and departs, and Mittavindaka is left alone with the wheel his own hand reached out to take: the clearest portrait among the three of how swiftly an unguarded blow against a mother outweighs a lifetime of counted coins.