Sankappa Jataka

A young nobleman of Savatthi who had taken ordination found his resolve shaken after catching sight of an elegantly dressed woman. He grew so troubled by the stirring of desire that his teachers brought him before the Buddha for guidance. The Buddha told him that even the purest ascetics, those who had mastered meditation to its furthest reaches, had once struggled against the very same arising, and he related the Sankappa Jataka, Jataka No. 251 of the Pali Canon, to show the young monk exactly how far a single unguarded thought could reach, and how completely it could be undone again.

In a former age, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a wealthy brahmin family. After his parents died, he renounced the household life entirely, journeyed into the Himalayas, and spent twelve years in unbroken meditation, cultivating the deep absorptions, states of meditative concentration, and the supernatural powers that come with mastering them. When he at last descended from the mountains to beg for alms, his composure was so complete and so visibly settled that the king of Benares, deeply impressed, invited him to make the royal park his permanent dwelling.

The ascetic accepted and lived undisturbed in the park for some time, flying through the air each day to take his meal at the palace. A rebellion on the kingdom's border called the king away to put it down. He left the queen in charge of seeing that the hermit's needs continued to be met in his absence, trusting that nothing in so settled a routine could possibly go wrong.

One afternoon, the ascetic descended through the air toward the palace terrace exactly as he always did. The queen, startled by the sound of his approach, rose too quickly, and her garment slipped before she could catch it. In that single unguarded instant, a thought of desire rose in the hermit's mind, and the moment it arose, the deep absorptions he had spent twelve years cultivating collapsed entirely, and with them the power of flight that had carried him there. He fell to the ground exactly where he stood. For seven days afterward he lay helpless in the park, consumed by the thought, unable to eat, unable to rise, and unable to find his way back to the stillness he had lost.

The king returned from putting down the rebellion and went to see the hermit. He found him lying in evident torment, yet no mark or wound of any kind on his body to explain it. Puzzled, the king asked what weapon could possibly have struck a man so completely while leaving no visible trace at all.

The Bodhisatta answered him in verse. No ordinary arrow had pierced him, he explained, no shaft of wood or point of iron, but a thought alone, arising and striking with every bit the force of a weapon though it carried no physical form whatsoever. He described how the thought of desire had entered through a single unguarded moment and lodged itself exactly where a true arrow might have, doing damage no physician's hands could ever reach to treat.

Having named what had struck him, the Bodhisatta turned his attention back to the very meditation object he had relied on for twelve years before the single moment that undid it. He held his mind to it steadily until the absorption he had lost reasserted itself and returned in full. Once his powers were restored, he rose into the air before the astonished king. This time he did not return to the palace park at all, but flew directly back to the Himalayas, where he remained in unbroken practice until his death. He passed afterward into the Brahma realm, a heaven-world reached through deep meditative attainment, that he had spent his whole life preparing to reach.

The Buddha concluded by telling the troubled young monk that he himself, in that distant life, had been the ascetic who fell to a single unguarded thought. He recovered only by returning, with full attention, to the practice that thought had interrupted. Ananda had been the king who found him in his extremity. The lesson reached the monk directly. No achievement in meditation, however many years it took to build, makes a person immune to the rise of an unguarded thought. The only remedy that ever actually works is the same one the Bodhisatta used, turning the mind back to its object rather than away from the practice altogether.