Panc-Uposatha Jataka

Jataka No. 490 of the Pali Canon was told by the Buddha to five hundred lay followers to encourage them in keeping the fast days faithfully. To show them that even wild animals had once found reason enough to observe the same discipline, the Buddha recalled an old story from the Himalayan forests.

In that former life, when Brahmadatta ruled Benares, the Bodhisatta renounced the household life and lived as an ascetic in a forest hut in the Himalayas. In that same forest lived a wood pigeon, a venomous serpent, a jackal, and a black bear, each of whom had come, through some past encounter with their own worst tendencies, to recognize the harm their particular weakness had caused them.

On the Uposatha day, the Buddhist fast day observed on the lunar calendar, the four animals gathered peacefully at the Bodhisatta's hermitage. Seeing them assembled together without any trace of their old hostilities, the Bodhisatta welcomed them and asked each in turn what suffering had led them to seek the refuge of this fast.

The pigeon confessed that he had once been consumed by passionate attachment to his mate, until a hawk swooped down and carried her away before his eyes, leaving him burning with a grief he had never expected passion itself to cost him. Realizing that such consuming attachment bred nothing but unbearable sorrow, he had taken up the fast to burn the root of that lust away.

The serpent admitted that he had once been hiding in an anthill when a village headman's bull trod on him, and in sudden fury he bit the bull, which died. The villagers mourned the bull and buried it, and only after they had gone did the serpent come out of the anthill. Seeing how his own anger had cost a creature its life and brought grief to a whole household, he repented and embraced the fast to extinguish that same wrath before it could claim anything else.

The jackal told of finding a dead elephant and burrowing inside it to feast, eating and drinking and making his bed among its organs. When the carcass dried out and the opening closed, he was trapped inside, until a storm softened the body and he forced his way out, bruised and with his fur left behind. Recognizing that his own uncontrolled greed had nearly cost him his life, he kept the fast now to master the craving that had trapped him.

The bear recalled wandering greedily into a frontier village in the Malla country, where the villagers set upon him with bows and cudgels and broke his head. He fled home badly wounded. Seeing that greed had brought him to that pass, he took up the fast to subdue the appetite that had carried him where he had no business going.

When his turn came, the Bodhisatta confessed that he too had carried a flaw into the forest with him. Proud of his noble birth, he had brought that pride with him even after renouncing the household life, and it kept him from attaining absorption. One day he found a Paccekabuddha (a solitary buddha who attains awakening alone and does not teach a following) seated on his stone seat, and in anger he insulted him. The Paccekabuddha calmly foretold that the ascetic would one day become the Buddha Siddhattha, then rose into the air and shook dust from his feet upon the ascetic's hair. Overcome with remorse for his pride and for failing to honour a holy man, the Bodhisatta vowed to subdue his conceit, and he then won the absorptions and higher knowledges.

The five companions spent that sacred night together in quiet contemplation, each having confessed exactly what his own weakness had cost him. Each found in the others' confessions nothing to judge, since every one of them, animal and ascetic alike, had needed the very same discipline to recover from a very similar wound.

At the story's end, the Buddha identified the pigeon, the bear, the jackal, and the serpent with four of his own chief disciples: Anuruddha, Kassapa, Moggallana, and Sariputta, in that order. He showed his five hundred lay listeners that even his own greatest disciples, and even the Bodhisatta himself in an earlier life, had once needed the same fast day's discipline to master a flaw no less real for being carried by a creature of the forest instead of a human being.