Mittavinda Jātaka

This story was told by the Teacher while dwelling at Jetavana, concerning a disobedient monk of gentle birth, recorded in the Pali Canon as Jātaka No. 369 of the Pañcanipāta, the Book of Fives, in the Vaṇṇārohavagga. Though ordained in the dispensation that leads to safety, and though his well-wishers, teachers, and fellow students instructed him carefully in the fourteen sets of monastic duties, the eighty great duties, and the thirteen ascetic practices (the traditional codes of conduct and austerity expected of a monk), he would not receive their counsel respectfully, saying: 'I do not find fault with you. Why do you speak thus to me? I shall know what is for my good, and what is not.' When the monks reported his defiance, the Teacher sent for him and asked whether it was true. The monk confessed that it was so. Then the Teacher said: 'Monk, why, after being ordained in so excellent a dispensation, do you not listen to the voice of your well-wishers? Formerly too you disobeyed the voice of the wise, and came to grievous ruin.' And he told this story of the past.

In the time of Kassapa Buddha, the Bodhisatta appeared as a celestial deity dwelling in the realm of the Four Great Kings. During that era, a merchant's son named Mittavindaka lived in Varanasi. Although his widowed mother was a devoted lay follower of the Buddha who observed the holy precepts and generously supported the Sangha, Mittavindaka despised spiritual practice and cared only for hoarding worldly riches. When his mother pleaded with him on a sacred Uposatha day to visit the monastery and hear the Dhamma, he rudely demanded money, took the coins, and fled into the city to squander them.

Later, consumed by ambition, Mittavindaka prepared to embark on a hazardous commercial voyage across the deep ocean. His weeping mother caught hold of his cloak to keep him from peril, but in unfilial wrath, he struck her down onto the ground and boarded the ship.

The ocean winds soon rebelled against his wickedness; the vessel froze dead in the water, and lots cast by the sailors singled out Mittavindaka three times as the cause of misfortune. Cast adrift on a bamboo raft, he drifted through otherworldly islands where he tasted transient heavenly pleasures with minor nymphs before being drawn relentlessly into the Ussada hell.

Arriving in that dismal abyss, Mittavindaka beheld a being undergoing excruciating torment, whose head was encircled by a blazing iron wheel equipped with razor-sharp blades that perpetually sheared through scalp and skull. Yet, distorted by his insatiable karmic delusion, the spinning agony appeared to Mittavindaka as a magnificent garland of blooming blue lotuses. Crying out, 'Friend, give me that gorgeous lotus garland to wear!', he eagerly seized the razor wheel and forced it onto his own head.

Then the Bodhisatta, in the form of a young deva, went down to the Ussada hell and asked him: 'What was the evil wrought by you, that your poor head should ever be riven by this circling wheel of torture?' Mittavindaka answered: 'Far fuller joys I thought to gain than any these poor worlds could show—this was the thought that proved my bane, and brought me to this scene of woe.' The Bodhisatta then spoke: 'From four to eight, to sixteen thence, and so to thirty-two, insatiate greed does grow. Thus on and on you, greedy soul, were led, till doomed to wear this wheel upon your head. So all who follow covetous desire, insatiate still, yet more and more require: the broadening path of appetite they tread, and, like you, bear this wheel upon their head.' But even as Mittavindaka spoke, the wheel bore down and crushed him, so that he could say no more. The Bodhisatta then returned straight to his own celestial abode.

His lesson ended, the Teacher identified the birth: 'At that time this disobedient monk was Mittavindaka, and I myself was the young deva.'

This Jātaka, too, exemplifies Paññā, the perfection of wisdom, but it answers a sharper present-day fault than its companion telling in Jātaka No. 82 of the Ekanipāta. There, the Teacher rebukes a monk who merely insists on his own judgment; here, the disobedient monk has been painstakingly instructed in the fourteen monastic duties, the eighty great duties, and the thirteen ascetic practices, and rejects them all outright. The past-life telling answers in kind: rather than a single closing verse from a distant king of the Devas, the Bodhisatta here takes birth as a young deva who descends in person, questions Mittavindaka directly, and recites five full verses of dialogue — and rather than a slow, unspecified torment, the wheel crushes Mittavindaka outright, mid-sentence, as the harsher fruit of a harsher defiance. Two Jātakas, one ancient trunk of narrative, each precisely fitted to the listener the Buddha had before him.