Takka Jataka

The Buddha told this Jataka, No. 63 of the Pali canon, while residing at Jetavana, to a monk who had become consumed by passion for a woman he had seen. The Teacher asked him plainly why he let himself be tossed about by passion for her, warning that passion left unchecked can blind a man to even the worst ingratitude and treachery until it is too late. To prove his point, he told of a hermit whose own hard-won attainment had once been undone by exactly this kind of folly.

In the days when Benares was ruled by its kings, the Bodhisatta renounced the world and took up the forest life, dwelling in solitude until, through sustained practice, he achieved genuine spiritual insight and the deep calm of meditative attainment. He lived simply, undisturbed by the world, by the banks of the Ganges.

One day, the hermit noticed a woman struggling in the river, carried along by the current and in real danger of drowning. She was the daughter of a treasurer, a woman whose nature, it would later become clear, was far from gentle. Moved by compassion, the hermit went into the water and brought her safely to the shore of his hermitage.

The woman stayed on at the hermitage for a time, and through her feminine grace and persistent wiles, she gradually seduced the hermit from his vows. Under her influence, he lost the very spiritual attainment he had worked so long to achieve, his mind pulled entirely away from meditation and toward her.

Having fallen from the ascetic life, the former hermit left the forest together with the woman and settled in a village, where he took up selling dates to support them both. In time, he became known among the villagers simply as the Date-Sage, a former sage now selling dates, a name that marked how far he had drifted from his earlier attainment.

Trouble came to the village when a band of robbers raided it. In the chaos, the woman was carried off by the robber chieftain himself, who took her as his own. The Date-Sage, left behind, found himself without the woman for whose sake he had given up so much.

Before long, the woman sent word to the Date-Sage, claiming to be unhappy in her new situation and asking him to come to her. He went to the robbers' hideout as she had asked, not suspecting her true intentions, for she had already resolved to betray him completely.

Once he arrived, the woman told the robber chieftain that this stranger lurking nearby was her former partner, implying a far more sinister accusation than the simple truth. Believing her, the chieftain seized the Date-Sage and beat him repeatedly, while the beaten man could only murmur under the blows, cruel ingrates, slanderous traitors, over and over.

Hearing the Date-Sage's murmured words and pressing him for an explanation, the robber chieftain gradually drew out the whole story, the rescue from the river, the seduction, the fall from grace, and now this final betrayal. Recognizing the woman's treachery for what it was, the chieftain turned on her in fury and put her to death on the spot.

Having seen so clearly what the woman's ingratitude had cost them both, the chieftain and the Date-Sage, now freed from her influence, each resolved to take up the ascetic life. They became hermits together, and through renewed and sincere practice both of them, in time, attained the heights of meditative insight once more.

The Buddha capped the story with a verse reflecting on this woman's wrath, slander, ingratitude, and strife-sowing, and urging the listening monk instead to tread the path of holiness, where genuine bliss could still be found. Concluding the tale, the Buddha identified Ananda as the robber chieftain of those days, and himself as the Date-Sage who had fallen and risen again.

This Jataka No. 63 endures not as a tale of unbroken serenity but as an honest account of how even a genuine attainment can be lost through infatuation, and how it can, with sincere effort, be regained. The Date-Sage's story offered the passion-stricken monk at Jetavana no easy comfort, only the sober truth that desire had once cost even the Bodhisatta his hard-won peace, and that the same desire, left unchecked, could cost any practitioner theirs as well. Yet the story closes not in despair but in restoration, showing that a fall from the path, however painful, need not be the end of the path itself.