by Sarah Shaw
went on his tour with a host of naga girls.
He sat down upon a seat that was made of gold,
cushioned and polished with essence of sandalwood.’
As soon as the king had sat down they brought before him heavenly food of many different flavours, and before the sixteen thousand women and the rest of the retinue too. He and his entourage stayed there for seven days and enjoyed heavenly food and drink and other sense pleasures. He delighted in heavenly sensual experiences and as he sat on the comfortable couch, he praised the glory of the Great Being. And then he asked, ‘Naga king, why do you abandon such good fortune as this and keep the uposatha, lying on a termite heap in the human realm?’ The Great Being told him.
In explanation the Teacher said:
30. ‘Enjoying himself and indulging in sensual delight the King of Kasi said:
“These, your excellent palaces, shine like the sun.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do you practise asceticism, O naga?
31. These are beautifully dressed women:
they wear gold bracelets and armlets and have rounded fingers
and copper-red palms and soles of the feet.
They are of unsurpassed beauty and stretch out their arms offering drinks.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do you practise asceticism, O naga?
32. [466] The rivers are safe and peaceful with large, flat fish;
their well-forded banks resound with birds that are free.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do you practise asceticism, O naga?
33. Cranes, peacocks, heavenly geese and sweet-singing cuckoos fly together.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do practise asceticism, O naga?
34. Mango, sal, tilaka and roseapple trees,
the cassia and the trumpet-flower tree are in full bloom.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do you practise asceticism, O naga?
35. These are your royal lotus ponds;
heavenly smells pervade them continually, all around.
There is nothing like this in the human world,
so why then do you practise asceticism, O naga?
36. “Not for the sake of children, nor wealth,
nor even for long life, O lord of men.
I have been longing for a human rebirth:
that is why I exert myself and follow an ascetic path.’
When he had said this the king said:
37. ‘You who are red-eyed, broad-shouldered, well dressed, with hair and beard groomed, well anointed with red sandalwood,
illumine the directions like a king of the heavenly musicians. 22
38. You, who have acquired the magical powers and great potency,
have all the pleasures of the senses at your disposal.
I ask you, naga king, the meaning: why is the human world better than this world?’
[467] In reply to him the naga king said:
39.‘Lord of men, nowhere but in the world of humans is there purity and self-control.
When I have attained a human rebirth I will make an end to birth and death.’
When he heard this the king said,
40. ‘It is truly the case that those who are wise,
who have heard much and who think deeply about how things are,
should be honoured.
Now that I have seen the naga ladies, and you, O naga, I will make merit in abundance.’
And the naga king replied to him:
41. ‘It is truly the case that those who are wise,
who have heard much and who think deeply about how things are,
should be honoured.
Now that you have seen the naga ladies, and me, O king, make merit in abundance.’
When the naga had said this Uggasena became eager to go. ‘Naga king, I have been here a long time. Let us go,’ and he asked permission to leave. And then the Great Being showed him his wealth:
42. ‘Here I have considerable wealth and a heap of gold, as high as a palmyra tree.
Take from this world and have golden houses made and let them make also a wall of silver. 23
43. [468] From this world take five thousand carts of pearls,
mixed with lapis lazuli, and let them spread them on the
floor of your ladies’ apartment, and it will be free from stain and without dust. 24
44. Live in such an excellent palace, that shines as brightly, O most excellent king.
Rule your kingdom, the splendid city of Varanasi, with peerless wisdom!’
The king heard his speech and assented. Then the Great Being had a drum beaten: ‘All the king’s entourage may take as much gold, money and other treasures as they wish!’ He sent the treasure to the king in a hundred waggons of various kinds. Then the king, in great magnificence, left the naga realm and went right back to Varanasi. From that time, it is said, the entire surface of Jambudipa (India) was gold.
The Teacher gave this talk and said, ‘In this way the wise of old abandoned the state of being a naga and lived keeping the uposatha.’ And he made the connections with the birth: ‘At that time the snake charmer was Devadatta, Sumana was Rahula’s mother, Uggasena was Sariputta and I was the naga king, Campeyya’.
Notes
1 J I 80.
2 Most famous are Bhuridatta Jataka (543) and Sankhapala Jataka (524).
3 Nagas, for instance, are said to remember past lives—perhaps in part a reason for the Bodhisatta’s shame at this rebirth.
4 For discussion on nagas, see R.F. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began, The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (London: Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 70–4 and Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, pp. 316–19.
5 However, Gombrich notes that no one seems to know the reason for this. See ibid., p. 73.
6 Jataka 543 (J VI 160–1). In the Bhuridatta Jataka a naga lady seduces a human ascetic. They have a daughter, Samuddaja, who is brought up as a human princess. She is tricked into marrying a naga king who has disguised himself as human. The product of their union is Bhuridatta, the Bodhisatta, who then determines to better his rebirth by keeping the uposatha.
7 The mythical garuda birds are the traditional enemy of nagas and seize them and their offspring whenever they can; only in the presence of a completely awakened Buddha are they friends, and sing his praises together.
8 J I 21.
9 The uposatha is the full-moon, half-moon and sometimes quarter-moon day (the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-third day of cycle). In practice, this usually means the full-moon day, as in Jataka 316.
10 The recollection of virtue, which includes the bringing to mind of occasions where these precepts have been observed, is one of the forty meditation subjects recommended by Buddhaghosa for bringing freedom from fear and a sense of contentment, as well as a happy rebirth. See Path of Purification, 240 (Vism VII 101–6).
11 For this translation I have been greatly aided by Thomas Oberlies’s recent work on this story, in ‘A Study of the Campeyya Jataka, including remarks on the text of the Sankhapala Jataka’, Journal of the Pali Text Society, XXVII, 2002, 115–46.
12 Lit. ‘was drinking a large drink.’
13 Although nagas themselves are considered auspicious the naga realm is technically a bad destiny, like an animal realm.
14 Bhuridatta Jataka (543) and Sankhapala Jataka (524) are both naga rebirths.
15 The air expelled from a naga’s nostrils was thought to be poisonous.
16 Perhaps this refers to the way cloth is beaten when it is laundered.
17 Osadhi is Venus, the morning star, used as an example of constancy, purity and whiteness (D II 111). Some accounts attribute its name to the fact that people drink medicines under its light, others to healing properties in its rays.
18 This verse a
nd the following piece of prose refer to a ‘hunter’. This section may represent a later addition to the text; the word ‘snake charmer’ has been substituted.
19 See Thomas Oberlies, ‘A Study of the Campeyya Jataka’, p. 127, n. 41.
20 I have followed DP I 499 for this translation.
21 DP I 604 gives this translation.
22 In ancient India red eye make-up was worn, which is perhaps why it is used as a term of approbation here.
23 There are no variants, so the meaning or relevance of the wall of silver or even the agent responsible for making it are unclear. Oberlies describes the linguistic problems in this passage as ‘insurmountable’. Ibid., p. 135.
24 Pearls and jewels generally were felt to be the special province of nagas (see Oberlies, ibid., p. 137). Pearls are in many cultures associated with the female and with chastity. Perhaps here they are also felt to have a magical purifying property that reflected and was a harbinger of sexual virtue, as was the case in medieval and Renaissance Britain. See Beverly Moon, ‘The Pearl’, in Mircea Eliade ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, XI, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 224–5.
{24}
The story of Temiya, the dumb cripple
Mugapakkha Jataka (538)
Vol. VI, 1–30
This story is considered one of the most important in Myanmar and is renowned throughout Buddhist countries. As the first of the last ten Jatakas (in Thai, Tosachat) it is also constantly depicted throughout temples in Thailand as amongst those representing the summation of the Bodhisatta path. 1 It describes a prince who feigns deafness, dumbness and the inability to use his limbs in order to escape the terrible kamma of being a king. Temiya, the Bodhisatta in this story, sees the terrible punishments inflicted by his father upon criminals. He recollects his own past life as a king, and the terrible hells he had experienced as a consequence. Urged on by a kindly goddess that lives in the white parasol, the symbol of kingship, the prince makes a resolve to feign disability. He deceives his parents and the subjects of the kingdom for sixteen years, causing them great distress until he finally convinces them all that he is unfit to assume the throne. He is condemned to death and a charioteer instructed to take him and kill him in a charnel ground outside the city limits. Even though the prince is consigned to an unlucky carriage, a sense of the auspicious accompanies his departure. The charioteer, told to leave by the unlucky gate, leaves by the fortunate eastern one; ‘a lovely spot’ is mistaken for the charnel ground where the prince is supposed to be killed. While the charioteer is digging his grave the boy rises, speaks and announces his intention to take up the holy life. The last part of the tale is taken up with dramatic interchanges of various kinds, largely in verse, in which the prince’s resolve is described, explored and tested through a series of dialogues between pairs of central characters. At the end we are given a gloriously implausible finale, in which the court and the entire population of three countries forsake palace, city and the lay life to live and meditate in an idyllic ascetic community in the woods.
In other contexts in the Pali Canon, the Bodhisatta employs regal authority to distribute gifts and bring material benefits to his subjects. 2 Here the role of king is presented as unequivocally damaging, certainly to oneself, and, in the case of the treatment of thieves and criminals, to others too. As Steven Collins notes: ‘It is difficult to imagine a more explicit denunciation of kingship.’ 3 The story has none of the public display of generosity associated with the famously munificent kings, Mahasudassana or Makhadeva (9); no indication is given that it is possible to reconcile kingship with adherence to the precepts and a skilful way of life. The kingdom is not being ruled with unusual cruelty or injustice: the punishments administered by the king to the four criminals, in the young Bodhisatta’s presence, are characteristic of the ancient Indian punitive system. 4 It is royal office itself which is at fault. So the beginning of the story is imbued with a curious sense of paralysis. King, queen, court, and Temiya himself are all unable to behave freely, crippled by the mystifying and frustrating deadlock that can be resolved only away from court and palace life, out of the city gates, where Temiya takes up the renunciate life. The story does not, however, rest upon a code of denial or rejection. Temiya’s purpose is an active one: in Thai temple art he is most popularly shown raising his chariot above his head to show his strength. 5 The tale posits a thoroughly Buddhist and a traditionally Indian ideal that is seen in so many tales: the authority of the holy life, which brings the simple happiness of spiritual practice and meditation, over that of king and state. For the ancient Indian, life in the city and in populous areas is associated with the lay life and the busy concerns of commerce, politics and business. 6 The world outside the city gates, the uncharted wilderness, needs treading with care. Its terrain includes the forest, the wasteland and the desert. It is the place for society’s rejects, wild animals and the site of inauspicious areas where bodies might be dumped in charnel grounds—as is nearly the case for Temiya. But it is also an area where it is possible to live freely, either as sannyasin, in the last stage of life, or as ascetic, who can roam where he pleases. 7 Renunciation (nekkhamma), the third perfection, is associated with giving up the lay life and taking the holy life: or, in the Bodhisatta vow, as an escape from prison. 8In this sense it is described as the subject of the tale in ‘the story from the present’ and can be seen as the object of the Bodhisatta’s single-minded dedication. Desire for renunciation gives us the simplicity of the tale’s neat, uncluttered construction and steers the action with a crisp momentum, to give an end result of a meditative utopia, in the rural community of ascetics who live off the various fruits and natural produce growing around them.
The way that this goal is achieved, however, would probably have seemed as odd in ancient times as it does now. It involves another perfection, that of resolve (adhitthana), with which this story is most commonly associated: the introduction to the Jatakas and the Basket of Conduct (Cariyapitaka) takes the tale as the prime example of its cultivation in the Bodhisatta path. 9 In this story resolve might seem at first sight a kind of stubbornness—particularly when we hear of the agonies inflicted upon the Bodhisatta’s parents because of it—but it was by such means that the Bodhisatta established himself on the path to enlightenment. Resolve, as the eighth perfection, is crucial in providing the basis whereby the Bodhisatta vow is set in motion. The Bodhisatta’s vow to cultivate the perfections uses the verb connected with it. ‘Having thus realized the fact of their being established in the heart, he firmly resolved on them (adhitthaya); and grasping them fully again and again he mastered them in their progressive and regressive orders.’ 10 In the injunction to practise these he is instructed to cultivate resolve, ‘just as a mountain, a rock, unwavering, is well established, and does not tremble in rough winds but remains in its own place’. 11 Resolve also features on the night of the enlightenment, when, as Gotama, the Bodhisatta makes the decision not to leave the Bodhi tree until he has found a way to freedom. Despite the immense weight attached to this perfection at the beginning of the tales, it occurs rather rarely in Jataka stories themselves. We have seen one in Jataka 20, when the Bodhisatta ensures that the cane stalks have no knots. There is also a resolve which is treated in an unusual way which occurs in the Matanga Jataka (497), when the Bodhisatta is reborn as an untouchable. 12 In this story the Bodhisatta sets his heart on a high-caste girl and determines to marry her. He waits outside her house for days, and despite her rebukes and the violence of her attendants, eventually obtains her, for, as the story points out, the resolve of Bodhisattas cannot be deflected. It should also be said that the Bodhisatta in this tale ascends to a Brahma heaven in order to be worthy of his wife, and, out of respect for her caste, never makes love to her, but conceives their child by placing a finger upon her stomach. One of the points being made is that resolve is a neutral quality and one which we all use for all kinds of outcomes. More typically, in the Bhuridatta Jataka (Jataka 543), the Bodhisatta as a naga is said
to be fulfilling the perfection of resolve by keeping the uposatha. 13 In the Mugapakkha Jataka the silent resolve that instigates the drama of the first part of the tale seems excessively lonely and rigid at first: by the end it has borne fruit and has a happy and even festive outcome for all concerned. The tale seems, indeed, a marriage between this perfection and that of renunciation, the stated subject of the tale. Linked to the intent to be free, resolve purifies not just the Bodhisatta himself, but those around him too.
Other features of this drama are worth exploring. The first part, with its testing of the Bodhisatta’s will through comparison with other children, gives us a delightfully graduated account of Indian attitudes to children. It also gives us a curiously modern perspective on childhood decision making: all children, to a certain extent, undergo something of this ‘refusal’ process, a feature which reinforces the sense that resolve is neutral in itself, but may take a skilful or an unskilful course. The rejection of the father, the bitterness of the struggle of wills between parent and child and the child’s unwillingness to fulfil parental expectations are all examined here in a manner that strikes chords with the methods of modern psychotherapeutic analysis. The story is a powerful study of these impulses with what is, however, a radically different orientation from the usual childhood battles. The resolve that is being tested is the Bodhisatta impulse; the conclusion the vindication of this impulse in the renunciate life. It is tested further through a series of dramatic set pieces after the Bodhisatta has left his parents’ world and stands on his own ground outside the city gates. In the first, the interchange between the charioteer and the prince, the prince gives his apologia for his past actions and explores ways of taking up the life that he wants that will cause the minimum of trouble to the king and his kingdom. The second gives the movement back within the kingdom and the interchange between the charioteer and the mother as the happy news is delivered. The third returns outside the city limits, to the interchange between his father and the prince as the king fails to persuade the boy to return to the kingdom; his son then convinces the king of the superiority of the holy life. These dialogues, which dramatize stances exemplified by each of the characters, involve the kind of explorations of motive and doctrine found in epic drama and Greek tragedy. They also provide some strikingly excellent poetry, including some of the most simply expressed and satisfying lyrical passages in the Jatakas as a whole. The verses in honour of friendship (vv. 12–21), the eulogy to the benefits of the holy life (vv. 87–90) and Temiya’s arguments against the king, his father, are all justly renowned. The two short verses (vv. 30– 1) on the benefits of not being in a hurry, an underlying theme within the tale, have a startlingly modern ring, and could usefully be pasted on modern motorway service stations and bus depots.