Serivavanija Jataka

The Buddha told this Jataka, No. 3 of the Pali canon, to a monk who had grown slack and was on the verge of abandoning his training. The Teacher warned him that giving up now, after so much progress, would be like the hawker of Seri who once let a golden bowl worth a hundred thousand pieces slip from his grasp through sheer greed, and who grieved over that loss for the rest of his days.

Long ago, five aeons before the present age, the Bodhisatta was born in the kingdom of Seri as a peddler of pots and pans, an honest trader known simply as the Serivan. In the same country lived another hawker who shared the very same name, but who was greedy, cunning, and utterly without scruple in his dealings.

The two peddlers travelled together to the wealthy city of Andhapura, and to avoid competing directly for customers, they agreed to divide its streets between them. The greedy Serivan took the first turn down a certain lane, one where a once-prosperous family had fallen into complete poverty, leaving only an old grandmother and her young granddaughter in the house.

The little girl wanted some trinket from the peddler's basket, and having no money, the grandmother remembered an ancient bowl left over from better days, now blackened and coated with grime. She brought it out and offered it to the greedy merchant in exchange for whatever small trifle he might spare.

Suspicious of its weight, the greedy Serivan scratched the surface of the bowl with a needle and saw beneath the soot the unmistakable gleam of pure gold. Rather than admit what he had found, he resolved to feign disinterest, return later, and claim the bowl for almost nothing.

Putting on a look of contempt, the greedy merchant declared that the bowl was not worth even half a farthing, a coin of the smallest value, and tossing it down carelessly, he left the house and continued on his way, confident he would come back and collect his prize cheaply before long.

Later that same day, the Bodhisatta, the honest Serivan, came down the same lane. The grandmother, remembering how rudely she had been treated, brought out the same blackened bowl, more out of habit than hope, and held it up for him to examine.

The Bodhisatta recognized the bowl at once for what it truly was and declared plainly that it was pure gold, worth a hundred thousand pieces, far beyond anything he carried with him. He gave the astonished family the full five hundred pieces of silver in his purse along with goods worth another five hundred, keeping for himself only his scales, his bag, and eight coins for the ferry crossing.

When the greedy Serivan returned and learned that an honest rival had claimed the golden bowl through fair dealing, grief and rage overtook him entirely. He tore off in pursuit, the balance-beam he weighed goods with still in hand, reaching the riverbank just as the Bodhisatta's boat pulled away into the current, already out of reach.

Watching the boat recede with the fortune he had thrown away, the greedy merchant's heart cracked within him from the sheer violence of his hatred and despair, much as dried mud cracks at the bottom of an emptied tank, and he died then and there on the riverbank, bound by his own fury to an enmity that would follow the Bodhisatta through many lives to come.

Concluding the tale, the Buddha identified the people in it with those before him: the greedy, scheming merchant who died of his own rage was Devadatta, and the Bodhisatta, the honest hawker who told the truth about the bowl and gave freely for it, was the Buddha himself.

This Jataka No. 3 endures as a warning against exactly the kind of slackness that had overtaken the discouraged monk at the story's telling. A single moment of greed, the decision to feign indifference rather than deal honestly, cost the Serivan a fortune that honesty would have secured for him outright. The Buddha held up this ancient failure as a mirror for anyone tempted to abandon sustained effort through impatience or craving, showing that what is given up through deceit or discouragement is very often never recovered, while what is pursued with integrity, however modest it first appears, can prove to be of far greater worth than anyone expected.