Pucimanda Jātaka

The Buddha told this story, Jataka No. 311 of the Catukkanipata (the Book of Fours) and its Pucimandavagga chapter, as recorded in the Pali Canon, concerning the elder Moggallana, who dwelt near Rajagaha and found a thief resting at the entrance of his hut. Sensing danger, Moggallana told the man not to lie there and drove him away, and when the man's pursuers arrived shortly afterward, they lost his trail entirely. When Moggallana reported the incident to the Buddha, the Buddha confirmed that his suspicion had been justified and related a tale from a previous birth showing a nearly identical act of foresight.

During the reign of King Brahmadatta in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as the guardian spirit of a Nimb tree standing in a cemetery grove at the edge of the city. Beside it stood an old Bodhi tree that housed a second tree spirit. A robber, having stolen goods from an outlying hamlet, entered the grove by night, placed his loot at the foot of the Nimb tree, and fell into a deep, careless sleep, believing himself safely hidden beneath its branches.

The Nimb spirit, perceiving the sleeping thief, did not act from simple kindness toward him. It acted from a precise and self-interested fear: in that city, robbers who were caught and condemned were impaled on stakes cut specifically from Nimb wood. If the pursuing watchmen found this man asleep beneath the tree, the spirit reasoned, they would cut a branch from this very trunk to make the stake of his execution. The spirit called out urgently, rise, robber, why do you sleep when it is no time for slumber, and drove the startled man from the grove before his pursuers could arrive.

Watching this from the neighboring tree, the Bodhi spirit questioned why the Nimb spirit had troubled itself so urgently, since surely no harm could come to the tree itself from a man merely sleeping beneath it. The Nimb spirit answered that the danger was not abstract but direct. Moments later the pursuing watchmen arrived and confirmed exactly this, that they would have impaled the robber on a stake cut from the Nimb tree had they caught him there, and the Bodhi spirit's doubt was answered in full.

Concluding the teaching, the Buddha identified the characters across both lifetimes. Sariputta had been the Bodhi tree spirit who questioned the urgency of the warning, and the Buddha himself had been the Nimb tree spirit. His foresight, sharpened by a danger that threatened his own existence rather than mere sentiment, drove the robber to safety before disaster could touch either the man or the tree.

The jataka is notably unsentimental about the Nimb spirit's motive, and this honesty is part of its point. Buddhist commentary reads the story as a deliberate rebuttal to the assumption that only pure, disinterested compassion can produce a genuinely good outcome. The Nimb spirit acted to protect its own trunk and branches, not out of love for a stranger it had never met. Yet the robber was spared all the same, waking in time to flee rather than being captured and executed with wood torn from the very tree beneath which he had slept. The jataka does not need the spirit's motive to be noble for the result to matter; it asks only that the danger be seen clearly and acted upon before it arrives, regardless of what finally supplies the urgency.

The exchange between the two tree spirits is not merely decorative dialogue added to lengthen the tale. By having the Bodhi spirit voice the reasonable assumption that a sleeping man poses no threat to a tree, the jataka stages the very skepticism a listener might otherwise bring to the Nimb spirit's urgency. It then answers that skepticism directly through the watchmen's own confirmation moments later. The doubt is raised precisely so that it can be settled by events rather than left to the audience's private judgment. This gives the Nimb spirit's foresight a vindication within the story itself, rather than asking readers to simply trust that the danger had been real.