Musika Jataka

During the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, the Bodhisatta was a world-renowned brahmin teacher. Among the many pupils who came to study the liberal arts under him was Prince Yava, son of the King of Benares. When Yava's education was complete and the time came for him to return home, the teacher looked ahead with the foresight of long experience and perceived that danger would one day come to this prince, not from an enemy abroad, but from his own son.

Rather than warn the prince outright, the teacher chose to encode his warning in verse, drawn from two ordinary incidents he observed around his own household. A horse kept near the well had injured its foot, and a mouse crept out of its hole night after night to gnaw at the sore. At last the horse, unable to bear the pain any longer, struck out and killed the mouse, kicking its body down into the well. From this single incident the teacher composed his first stanza, built on the riddle of a creature everyone sought but only the teacher knew lay dead and hidden.

Later, once the horse's wound had healed, it wandered to a barley field and thrust its head through a gap in the fence to steal grain, giving the teacher material for a second verse. A third verse he composed from his own wisdom alone, needing no outward incident to prompt it. He gave all three to Prince Yava with precise instructions: recite the first on reaching the bathing tank in the evening, the second at the foot of the palace stairs, and the third only upon reaching the top step. Yava, trusting his teacher completely though he understood none of their meaning, carried the verses home and kept them close for years.

In time Yava succeeded his father and ruled as king of Benares. He married and had a single son, who grew to sixteen years of age healthy, clever, and increasingly resentful of waiting for the throne. The young prince complained to his companions that his father was still young and strong, and that by the time the old king's funeral pyre was lit, he himself would be an old man with little left to enjoy as ruler. His attendants, rather than counsel patience, urged him toward the one shortcut that would end the wait at once.

Persuaded by this reckless counsel, the prince resolved to kill his own father and seize the crown before his time. He chose to strike where the king would be most exposed and unguarded, the private bathing tank the king visited each evening, and armed himself with a drawn sword to wait in hiding there.

That evening the king, as was his custom, sent a serving woman named Musika ahead to prepare his bath. She came upon the prince crouched there, sword in hand, and in his panic at being discovered he struck her down and hid her body in the tank, then slipped away. When the king arrived, his attendants searched everywhere for the missing Musika, calling her name without answer. Reaching the edge of the tank himself, King Yava began to recite, unprompted, the first verse his teacher had given him long ago, a verse that spoke of something everyone sought and only the speaker knew lay hidden and dead nearby.

Hearing his father speak these words precisely at that moment, the prince was seized with terror, certain the king had somehow divined his crime and his plot. He fled to his fellow conspirators and confessed what had happened. They reassured him that a king who truly knew of a plot against his life would never remain silent about it, and persuaded him that his father's words had been mere coincidence. Emboldened again, the prince resolved to try a second time.

Days later, the prince hid at the foot of the palace stairway, sword ready, waiting for his father to climb up for the night. As the king ascended, he once again recited, without any apparent cause, the second verse his teacher had composed: a riddle about a creature that, having killed once already, might well be hungry for more. Once more the prince's nerve broke entirely, and he fled into the darkness, convinced his father somehow saw through every plan he made.

After two weeks spent brooding, the prince devised a new weapon disguised as an ordinary long-handled spoon, hoping its innocent shape would let him approach his father unsuspected. He waited at the top of the stairs. But as King Yava climbed toward him, he recited the third and final verse, this one needing no earlier incident to inspire it, warning plainly of a foolish child clutching a weapon disguised as a harmless toy. Confronted so directly, the prince's courage collapsed entirely. He threw himself down before his father, confessed everything, and begged to be spared.

King Yava, moved more to sorrow than to fury, had his son bound and held in confinement rather than executed, and later, seated beneath the royal white parasol, declared to his court how his old teacher's foresight, given to him as three unexplained verses decades earlier, had preserved his life three times over. He praised the lasting worth of learning kept even when its purpose is not yet known. In time, when King Yava himself passed away, his son, having learned humility through his confinement, was raised to the throne in his place.

The Buddha told this story while staying in the Bamboo Grove, prompted by his own observation of King Ajatasattu playing affectionately with his young son even while danger from an heir's ambition was a known peril among kings of old. Concluding the ancient tale, the Buddha revealed that he himself, in that distant life, had been the far-famed brahmin teacher who foresaw Prince Yava's danger and armed him with the three saving verses.

The Musika Jataka, No. 373 of the Pancanipata's Addhavagga in the Pali Canon's Jatakatthavannana, endures as a teaching that learning given without immediate explanation is never wasted, for its moment of use will arrive when it is least expected. The teacher's three verses, born from nothing grander than a mouse biting a horse's wound and a hungry animal reaching through a fence, became the very words that spared a king's life three times over. True protection, the tale insists, lies not in walls or weapons but in wisdom patiently carried until the hour it is needed.