Sattigumba Jataka

The Buddha told this Jataka, No. 503 of the Pali canon, while staying near the deer park at Maddakucchi, not long after Devadatta had hurled a rock from above and wounded his foot. The monks fell to discussing how those inclined to wrongdoing naturally gravitate toward the company of others like themselves. The Teacher told them that this pattern was nothing new, and that Devadatta's present behavior had a precedent reaching back through a much older story of two brothers separated at birth.

Long ago, two young parrots lived together in a silk-cotton tree on a forest hilltop. When the time came for them to moult, shedding their old feathers, a sudden whirlwind struck the tree and scattered the two brothers in opposite directions. One fell among a heap of weapons in a robbers' village and was named Sattigumba, meaning Bristling Spears, after the place of his fall. The other landed gently amid flowers at a forest hermitage and was named Pupphaka, the Flower-bird, for the same reason. The Bodhisatta was Pupphaka.

Sattigumba grew to maturity among the robbers, hearing daily talk of plunder, violence, and deception, and in time he came to speak and think exactly as they did. Pupphaka, raised among the forest sages at the hermitage, absorbed their restraint, their gentleness, and their devotion to what was right and true, so that the two brothers, though identical in plumage, grew to be nothing alike in heart or speech.

Some time later, the king of the Uttara-Pancala kingdom rode out to hunt deer. When an antelope broke from the beaters and escaped past him without a clean shot, the king felt the sting of embarrassment before his court, and in frustration he set off alone with only his charioteer in pursuit of the game, driving deep into unfamiliar forest until he had lost his way entirely.

Weary from the chase, the king and his charioteer stopped to rest near the robbers' village where Sattigumba now lived, and the king soon fell asleep. Perched nearby, Sattigumba noticed the sleeping king's fine garments and golden crown, and turning to Patikolamba, the cook of the robber band, he proposed that they rob the sleeping monarch while he lay helpless.

Patikolamba, uneasy at the thought of laying hands on a king, protested that kings were as dangerous to approach as blazing bonfires. Sattigumba would hear none of it, defending the robbers' trade as the only livelihood his family had ever known, and insisting there was no shame in doing what their birth and circumstance required of them.

As the two spoke together in perfectly human language, the king stirred and woke, and lying still he overheard the entire exchange. Saying nothing of alarm aloud, he quietly roused his charioteer and told him they must seek shelter elsewhere, for he liked nothing about this parrot's counsel. The two slipped away in their chariot before the robbers' plot could be carried out.

Driving on, the king and his charioteer came at last to the forest hermitage, where they found Pupphaka alone, the sages themselves being away. The courteous parrot welcomed the weary king warmly, offering him the fruits gathered in the forest and water drawn from a hidden spring, explaining that all who dwelt there lived simply on what the woodland itself provided.

Astonished that two parrots so alike in form could differ so completely in character, the king asked Pupphaka to explain the mystery. Pupphaka answered that Sattigumba had been taught nothing but wounds, bonds, and trickery, while he himself had learned self-restraint, sobriety, and kindness. To make the lesson vivid, he offered two images: wrap rotten fish in grass, and the grass itself will come to stink of fish, but wrap sweet frankincense in a leaf, and the leaf will take on its fragrance. Company, he explained, shapes character exactly so.

Moved by this teaching, the king granted the hermitage sages shelter within his own royal park, and he declared that parrots throughout his realm should never be harmed, extending his protection and honor to the sages and their forest for seven generations, until in time he himself passed on to a heavenly rebirth. Pupphaka too, in the course of time, passed away according to the working of his own deeds.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha identified the people in it: Devadatta was Sattigumba, the corrupting parrot of the robbers, Devadatta's own followers were the robbers themselves, Ananda was the king of Pancala, the Buddha's own followers were the sages of the hermitage, and the Buddha himself had been Pupphaka, the gentle parrot who taught the king what true company could do.

This Jataka No. 503 endures as one of the clearest canonical statements that character is shaped far more by company than by birth or appearance. Two brothers, hatched of the same parents and identical in every outward feature, became opposites in speech and intention simply because a whirlwind placed one among robbers and the other among sages. The Buddha used the ancient quarrel between a corrupting companion and a corrupted following to show his own monks, through Devadatta's case, that the same law of influence still applies today. The company one keeps shapes the heart, for good or for ill, just as it shaped the two parrots long ago.