An interesting Jataka comes to mind this week that I would like to retell for its morally cheering quality. Aeons ago, there lived a very rich merchant family in a grand city somewhere in the Upper Gangetic Plain. The family lived in great splendour in their magnificent townhouse with its large inner courtyard and its own temple. Acres of gardens surrounded the house and large cowsheds and stables stood at the back.
The family gave generously to orphans and homeless people, to the king’s hospice and to the charitable projects of temples. They supported poor students and indigent widows and contributed handsomely to the upkeep of rest houses for travellers and pilgrims. They often went to their pleasant country estate upriver, where they put up swings in the mango orchards. They swam, boated, picnicked, played games of pachisi, sang songs and told stories over moonlight suppers, all three generations of them together—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and children.
However, the fortunes of this family became greatly reduced when all the men and many women died one by one. The servants went away to find other work. Only an old grandmother and her little granddaughter were left. They escaped starvation by hiring themselves out as domestic workers to a few families.
Since they were too old and too young respectively to do heavy work, they did small kitchen chores for which they were paid accordingly. Their mornings became an endless round of light cleaning, peeling and cutting vegetables, washing and drying the whole spices, picking kilos of rice and lentils clean and helping to make pickles and papads. They were given leftover food after the families they worked for had eaten their morning meal. It was a massive comedown for those who had been waiting on all their lives and never lacked anything, but they were glad not to have to beg.
At this time, the Bodhisattva or Buddha in a previous birth was a trader who worked in the city with another trader. This business partner was secretly less scrupulous than the Bodhisattva but the Bodhisattva knew nothing about it. Their agreement was to divide the town into territories and enter each other’s area only after the other had left.
One afternoon, the greedy trader came down the former fine family’s street calling aloud his wares. He had rare and costly things to offer like necklaces of foreign coins, coral strings and chains of fine glass beads imported from across the Eastern Sea.
Now nearly eight years old, the little girl had been taught her manners since she was barely two. She missed her mother and father, having lost them both in a boat wreck. But she managed not to complain about having to work so hard or not having enough to eat or wearing abominable old cast-offs. Nor did she complain about being spoken crossly to sometimes by the spoiled children of the houses she worked in. With the considerate behaviour of the well brought-up, she knew that doing so would have embarrassed and hurt her grandmother and so she shed tears only in private.
But an instinct for fine things was in her blood, so when she saw the trader’s pretty necklaces she suddenly longed to have something nice of her own. So she begged her grandmother to trade what she could.
Touched to be asked, the grandmother rummaged in the storeroom of their crumbling house. She noticed a grimy bowl in a corner and brought it to the trader. One discreet scratch with a needle and the trader knew he held a bowl of solid gold. Plotting instantly to get it for almost nothing, he threw it back saying it was too worthless to trade and waited expectantly for the old lady to beg him to take it. But the old lady did no such thing for such a move simply did not occur to her.
Instead, she withdrew quietly, little realising that it was the payasa bowl of the head of their family that had been put away after his death and become unrecognisably dirty. The little girl blinked back her disappointment and instead hugged her grandmother for trying.
When the Bodhisattva came by two hours after his wily business partner had left, the little girl did not dare accost him for fear of another snub. But he swung a handful of necklaces in such a friendly, jolly manner and smiled in such a kindly way, that she asked him to wait and called her grandmother. The grandmother brought the bowl back and handed it to the trader. She sent the little girl back to close the storeroom door so as to leave them alone for a minute.
When the little girl ran in, the grandmother whispered to the trader that she knew the bowl was worthless. But she pleaded with him to do the best he could, to give a very simple necklace or at least a bead bangle to the child.
“But who told you this bowl was worthless?” exclaimed the good trader, giving it a good rub and showing her its shine. Not only did he give them a fair deal for the golden bowl but he also obligingly paid cash for other things of value discovered in the storeroom. He even gifted the little girl a pretty glass bead necklace, just to please the child.
He went away with a clear conscience as usual, receiving many blessings from the grandmother and a radiant smile from the little girl, for the warm blanket so suddenly obtained from cold fate.
The greedy trader collapsed and died of rage when he found out. While the good trader was of course the Bodhisattva, the greedy trader who was not above trying to cheat widows and orphans was the Buddha’s wicked cousin Devadatta.
This was the beginning of Devadatta’s bitter and vengeful grudge against the Buddha through many births thereafter, carrying mountains of baggage and never being at peace for a moment in all those lifetimes.