Udaya Jataka

The Buddha told this story at Jetavana about a monk who had grown weary of the holy life and longed for sensual pleasure. Learning of his discontent, the Buddha reminded the brothers that wise kings of old had mastered desire far more completely than this, and told the story to show what such mastery looked like. The account is preserved in the Pali Canon's Jataka book as the Udaya-Jataka, No. 458 of the collection.

Long ago, the king of Kasi reigned in his city of Surundha without son or daughter. In time his chief queen bore a son, who was named Udayabhadda because his birth gladdened so many hearts. Soon after, another of the king's wives bore a daughter, who received the same name in its feminine form, Udayabhaddā. Both children had been pure of heart through countless past lives and shrank from sensual desire even as they grew. When the king urged his son to take the throne and marry, the prince set a condition. He would marry only a woman who could match a golden statue of a woman he had commissioned and sent throughout the land in search of her equal. No woman could be found to equal the statue until the king presented his own daughter, whose beauty surpassed it where she stood.

Prince Udayabhadda and Princess Udayabhaddā were married as their parents wished, yet they kept to their earlier purity. They dwelt together in a single chamber but never looked upon one another with desire, denying their senses as completely after marriage as before it.

When the old king died, Udayabhadda took the throne, and Udayabhaddā ruled beside him as his queen, the two of them governing in justice while keeping their vow of celibacy intact. In the long ages the tradition remembers, they reigned together for seven hundred years.

Sitting together one evening, the king and queen spoke of what might lie beyond this present life. They agreed between themselves that whichever of them died first would return, if it were possible, to tell the other what had become of them in their next existence.

Not long after this agreement, Udayabhadda died. Because of the purity he had kept throughout his life, he was reborn at once as Sakka, king of the gods, in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, the heavenly realm over which Sakka presides. For seven days by the reckoning of that heaven, he could not recall his former life at all, as is the way of beings newly born there. Only after a span the tradition gives as seven hundred years by human counting did he remember the promise he had made to his queen.

Remembering his promise, Sakka resolved to test whether Udayabhaddā, still reigning alone in Surundha, had kept her own purity through so many years of solitude. He came to her at night carrying a bowl brimming with gold, praising her flawless beauty as she sat alone on the terrace of her palace, and asked to spend the night with her in exchange for the gold. The queen refused him outright, declaring that she wanted no one, neither god, nor spirit, nor man, now that Udayabhadda was dead. Sakka vanished at her refusal.

The following night, Sakka returned with a bowl of silver, speaking again of the pleasures he offered and pressing his suit. This time the queen judged that answering him at all, even to refuse him, would only invite him to return again and again. She said nothing in reply, and Sakka, finding no response to work with, vanished once more.

On the third night, Sakka came again, this time with a bowl of iron, worth less than either gold or silver before it. Now the queen spoke, pointing out the strangeness of his conduct: mortal men who wished to win a woman's favor raised their offer each time, yet this visitor had lowered his with every visit. She asked whether the being before her, who claimed to be no mere man, might in fact be subject to the same decline and age that mortals knew.

Her question opened the way for Sakka to explain the nature of his own unaging existence, and at last he revealed who he truly was. He told her plainly that he was Udaya, the shortened form of his own former name Udayabhadda, come to fulfill the promise they had made to one another so long before. Having kept his word and spoken to her, he said, he was now free of the pact between them.

Before departing, Sakka taught the grieving queen four truths in verse, so that his visit would leave her with more than sorrow. He told her that youth passes in a moment and does not return. He told her that even if the whole earth belonged to a single king, that kingship could not save him from death. He told her that mother, father, and every kinsman must part at last, bound by nothing stronger than the body's own decay. And he told her that this very body she prized would in time become food for other creatures, and that she should walk in piety while she still could.

Hearing this teaching, Udayabhaddā gave up her throne the very next day. She entrusted the kingdom to her ministers, left the palace, and took up the life of a recluse in a park within her own city, where she lived out her days in righteousness. When she died, she was reborn in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three as a handmaiden in the household of the very Sakka who had tested and taught her.

Closing the story, the Buddha told the monks who the figures in it had been. The princess Udayabhaddā, he said, was in that birth the woman who later became Rahula's mother, the Buddha's own son in his final life. The Buddha himself had been Sakka, the god who kept his promise and taught her the truth of impermanence.

The Udaya-Jataka does not ask its hearers to doubt that love and loyalty can last between two people across a long reign and even beyond death. It asks them to see what such loyalty is finally worth measured against decay that spares no one, not a king with seven hundred years on his throne, not a queen whose beauty outshone a statue of gold. The monk at Jetavana who had grown weary of his vows needed exactly this reminder. Whatever pleasure the senses promise rises and falls like Sakka's bowls of gold, silver, and iron. The discipline that renounces them in good time is the only offer that does not lose its worth with age.