Renunciation
Jataka Tales
A landowner's gift passes from a disguised king to his chaplain, to a forest ascetic, and finally to a Pacceka Buddha, the truly worthy recipient (No. 496).
Two souls move together through rebirth after rebirth, as outcasts, deer, and birds, until one becomes a king and the other a single verse away from waking him.
A young ascetic drawn toward a stranger's promises of city life is pulled back from the brink by his father's counsel on the dangers that lie in a renunciant's path.
A prince who once despised women falls for a singer's voice, elopes and is exiled, then recovers his own clarity while watching another man fall the same way.
Jātaka No. 525: King Sutasoma sees a grey hair, gives up his kingdom despite every plea, and a whole city follows him to a Himalayan hermitage.
Two kings renounce their empires for the forest, until one quietly hoards a little salt and learns that the smallest grasping can undo a whole renunciation.
Jataka No. 421: King Udaya's own half-day fast as a dying laborer secured him a throne; a water-carrier's half-penny and his royal barber's curiosity both lead further still, to renunciation.
Four gods choose to be born as a chaplain's sons specifically so they can renounce the world young, and their departure empties an entire kingdom behind them.
The hermit Narada, smitten by a courtesan, wastes away until his teacher Sarabhanga, brought by his brother Kaladevala, counsels him and he regains his attainments.
A deaf mother-in-law mishears praise of a squire as proof he turned hermit, so he vows a lucky word must not be wasted — and truly renounces the world.
Jātaka No. 467: a farmer grieves over his flooded crop, and the Buddha recalls a young physician who cured a king sick with greed.
Four kings renounce their thrones after four ordinary sights, and a potter who hears their stories waits to follow until his children can cook for themselves.
Falsely accused by his lustful stepmother, Prince Mahā-Paduma is hurled from a cliff, saved by a mountain deity and Nāga king, and forgives his father.
Born a prince who abhors women, the Bodhisatta is seduced by a dancer, exiled with her, and finds clarity by saving an ascetic the same woman undid.
A shipwrecked prince swims for seven days, wins a stolen throne through four tests, then walks away from it despite his own wife's every attempt to stop him.
Jataka No. 95: before dying at Kusinara, the Buddha recalls King Sudassana teaching his weeping queen that all component things are transient.
Jataka No. 9: King Makhadeva asks his barber to warn him of his first grey hair. When it appears, he sees it as Death's messenger and leaves his throne.
A peerless archer walks away from an army command the night before receiving it, and kings and Sakka himself later seek the hermit he became to ask about karma.
A king who forgot his boyhood friend searches for him for decades, and finds him as an awakened Pacceka Buddha who teaches him, with the parable of a crow on a carcass, to let go of sensual desire.
A former king turned monk is accused of boasting when he cries out in joy, until the Buddha reveals the same royal fear and monastic peace from an older life.
Given a crown to save a longing queen-mother, the Bodhisatta Susīma is woken to ageing by her grey-hair trick and leaves for the Himalayas.
A prince spends sixteen years feigning deafness and paralysis to escape a throne he fears will damn him, and his discovery ends in a kingdom's renunciation.
King Udayabhadda dies, becomes Sakka, and tests his celibate queen with bowls of gold, silver, and iron before teaching her impermanence.
An untouchable wind-deer is lured into a palace one honeyed blade of grass at a time, showing how a taste for sweetness can tame even the wildest creature.
A prince watches morning dew vanish by evening and sees his own life in it so clearly that he renounces a kingdom of a thousand brothers that very day.