The Prince Who Feigned Dumbness

At Jetavana, monks spoke admiringly of the Buddha's own Great Renunciation of palace and throne. The Buddha told them that an even more remarkable renunciation had once been his, made in an age before his perfections were even fully ripened, and told the story in full.

King Kasiraja of Benares and his queen Candadevi had long been childless until she kept a solemn uposatha vow (a Buddhist observance-day vow of special discipline), and Sakka (the king of the gods in Buddhist cosmology) himself sent the Bodhisatta down to be conceived as her son, Prince Temiya. At only a month old, seated on his father's lap in the throne room, Temiya watched the king sentence four thieves to torture and death. In that instant he recalled his own former life: twenty years spent ruling as a king, followed by eighty thousand years suffering for it in the Ussada hell (one of the subsidiary hells of Buddhist cosmology). He was seized with terror at the thought of ever sitting on that same throne himself.

That night, a goddess dwelling in the royal umbrella above his cradle, who had been his mother in an earlier existence, whispered him a way out. He should show no intelligence at all, feigning deafness, muteness, and paralysis so completely that no one would ever crown an heir believed incapable of ruling. Temiya resolved on the plan at once and held to it without a single lapse for sixteen years.

His parents refused to believe their son was truly afflicted and tested him constantly. They withheld milk to starve a response from him, dangled sweets and toys before his eyes, loosed snakes near his crib, lit fire close enough to feel, and sounded loud instruments without warning. They smeared his body with molasses and left him to flies, denied him bathing through the worst heat, and, as he grew older, sent dancing girls to stir some flicker of desire in him. Not once did Temiya so much as flinch, though every trial cost him dearly.

When physicians and soothsayers alike declared the prince truly cursed, the king resolved to have him buried alive rather than let an ill-omened heir taint the throne. Queen Candadevi won her son one final concession, a week as acknowledged crown prince before the sentence was carried out, and then the charioteer Sunanda was sent to drive him to a charnel ground and bury him there.

The moment Sunanda began digging the grave, Temiya rose from the chariot, his limbs working perfectly after sixteen years of feigned paralysis, adorned in an instant by Sakka's own craftsman Vissakamma with heavenly ornaments. When the stunned charioteer could not believe what he saw, Temiya recited ten verses on loyalty and the wrongness of betraying one who had cared for him. He then lifted the entire chariot over his head as though it weighed nothing, leaving no doubt at all about who he truly was.

Sunanda returned to the city and told the queen everything. The king himself came to the forest with a grand procession to beg Temiya home. Temiya's own teaching on impermanence and the emptiness of worldly power moved his father so completely that the king renounced the throne on the spot, followed by the queen, the royal wives, and in time the whole court. Two neighboring kings, each hoping to seize an undefended Benares, arrived instead to find themselves converted by the very teaching that had already transformed the city.

Sakka raised a hermitage three leagues wide for the multitude who now wished to live the holy life, and in time even the animals of that forest found peace enough to be reborn among the heavens. The Buddha closed the teaching by naming Uppalavanna as the goddess who had once been his mother, Sariputta as the charioteer Sunanda, and his own royal family as the king and queen. His own Sangha, he said, had been the great assembly that followed Temiya into the forest. He himself, he said, had been Temiya, whose sixteen years of unbroken silence had spared not only his own life but, in the end, an entire kingdom's. Jataka No. 538 of the Pali Canon's Mahanipata records the tale under this telling.

What makes Temiya's ordeal unlike most tests of courage in these stories is that no single moment demanded everything of him. Instead, every single day for sixteen years demanded the same unbroken restraint, with no dramatic battle to end it quickly and no certainty the plan would ever actually work. His victory was won entirely in the accumulation of thousands of ordinary moments in which he simply did not react, each one as replaceable as any other and each one just as necessary as the last.