The Golden Mallard

At a Glance

Central figures: The Bodhisatta, reborn as a golden mallard; his former wife, now a poor Brahmin woman in Benares; and their two daughters.
Setting: The city of Benares and its outskirts, in the Jataka tradition of the Pali canon.
The turn: The mother, not content with the single golden feather the mallard gives at each visit, seizes the bird and plucks him bare.
The outcome: The feathers, torn out by force, lose their gold and turn white. The mallard grows back only ordinary plumage and never returns.
The legacy: The family is left as poor as before, and the golden mallard flies away for good - a Jataka illustration of how greed destroys the very thing it grasps.

A golden mallard landed on the roof-beam of a poor house at the edge of Benares. He had been watching the house for three days from the river. He knew the woman who lived there. He knew the two girls. In his last life he had been their husband and father, and he had died, and the wheel had turned, and he had come back as a bird - but a particular kind of bird. Every feather on his body was gold. Not gold-colored. Gold. Each one could be pulled free, taken to the market, and sold for the price of a meal, a cloth, a week’s rent. He had been watching and waiting because the woman and her daughters were hungry, and he remembered them.

He folded his wings and spoke.

The Feather on the Roof-Beam

The woman’s name is not recorded. The Jataka calls her simply the Brahmin woman. She had been wealthy once, when her husband lived. After his death the money went and the house shrank and the daughters grew thinner. She took in washing. She carried water. She did what poor women in Benares did.

When the mallard spoke from the roof-beam she did not scream. She looked up. The bird said he had been her husband in his former life. He said he had come back in this form and that his feathers were gold. He said he would give her one feather each time he visited, and that one feather would be enough to keep the household fed and clothed until his next visit.

He plucked a feather from his own wing and let it fall. It rang when it hit the floor - a small, bright sound, like a coin dropped on stone. The woman picked it up. It was warm and heavy in her hand.

The mallard flew away. The woman took the feather to the market. It sold. She bought rice, ghee, lentils, new sandals for the younger girl. For the first time in months, all three of them ate until they were full.

The Visits

The golden mallard came back. He came regularly - the text does not say how often, but often enough that the poverty lifted. Each visit, one feather. Each feather, enough. The daughters wore clean clothes. The woman no longer carried other people’s water. The house was repaired. A lamp burned in the window at night.

The mallard asked for nothing. He landed, spoke briefly, left the feather, and flew. Sometimes the girls talked to him and he talked back, telling them small things about the river, the fish, the way the light looked from above. He was not unhappy as a bird. He had the river and the sky, and he had the knowledge that his former family was fed. The arrangement was simple and it worked.

But the woman began to think.

One feather at a time. One. She looked at the mallard when he came - at the full spread of his wings, the breast thick with gold, the tail trailing gold, the small feathers around his throat each one worth a day’s wages. Hundreds of feathers. She counted them in her mind. She began to count them each visit, estimating, recalculating.

She said to her daughters: He could give us more.

The daughters said: He gives us enough.

She said: What if he stops coming? What if he dies? What if a hawk takes him? We should get them all. We should get them now.

The daughters said: No. He is our father. He comes because he chooses to. Leave him alone.

The woman did not listen.

The Seizing

The next time the golden mallard landed on the roof-beam, the woman reached up and grabbed him with both hands. He was not large - a mallard is not large - and she was strong from years of labor. She pinned his wings against his body and held him while he struggled.

The mallard said: Do not do this. The feathers given freely are gold. The feathers taken by force will not be.

She did not listen to that either. She plucked him. She pulled the feathers out in handfuls - from his breast, his wings, his back, his tail. She stripped him bare to the skin, a raw pink trembling thing in her fists. The feathers piled on the floor around her feet.

They were white. Every one of them. White and weightless, ordinary duck-down, worth nothing. The gold was gone the moment they were torn free. She held a naked bird and stood in a pile of white fluff and the room was exactly as poor as it had been before the first visit.

The White Bird

She put the mallard in a barrel. She could not sell him and she could not eat him - he had been her husband - so she kept him, hoping the gold would come back. It did not. The feathers grew in slowly, the way feathers do, and they came in white. Plain white. A white mallard with dark eyes, sitting in a barrel in a poor woman’s house, saying nothing.

When his feathers had grown back enough for flight, he climbed out of the barrel and flew. He did not go to the roof-beam. He went to the window ledge, and he looked at the woman and the two daughters. The daughters were crying. The woman was not.

The mallard said nothing more to any of them. He lifted off the ledge and flew out over Benares, over the river, and away. He did not come back.

What Remained

The house was poor again. The lamp in the window went out for lack of oil. The woman went back to carrying water. The daughters grew thin again.

The Bodhisatta, in his golden life as a mallard, had offered exactly what the family needed - enough, given freely, sustained by trust. The woman had wanted all of it at once, and the wanting had burned the gold out of every feather. What she held in her hands after the seizing was not wealth but the proof of its absence.

The two daughters remembered their father differently. They remembered the small bright sound of a feather hitting the floor. They remembered his voice talking about the river. They remembered that one feather had been enough, and that enough had been more than they had ever had before, and that it was gone now and would not return.

The mallard flew white above the Ganges for the rest of his life. His feathers never turned gold again.