The Great Monkey

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as a great monkey-king of enormous strength and wisdom, and a man whom the monkey saved from a gorge.
• Setting: A forested river gorge in the Himalayan foothills; from the Pali Jataka collection (Mahakapi Jataka, No. 516).
• The turn: The monkey-king rescues a man trapped at the bottom of a deep gorge, carrying him out on his back despite exhaustion - then falls asleep trusting the man he saved.
• The outcome: The man, tempted by hunger, strikes the sleeping monkey with a rock to kill him for meat; the monkey survives and, bleeding, still leads the man out of the forest to safety.
• The legacy: The monkey-king’s act became one of the defining Bodhisatta stories of paramita - the perfection of patience and loving-kindness extended even toward one who has done harm.

The gorge ran deep below the tree line, and at the bottom of it a man was dying. He had slipped from the trail three days earlier - or four, he had lost count - and the walls of wet rock rose on every side too steep and too slick to climb. He shouted, but the forest above was thick, and no one traveled that road.

A monkey heard him. Not an ordinary monkey. He was the king of his troop, large as a man, golden-furred, and old enough to know the gorge and every handhold in it. He came to the rim and looked down. The man was small from that height, but his voice carried.

The Descent

The monkey-king descended. He used roots and crevices the man could never have found, moving with the ease of something born to vertical stone. When he reached the bottom, the man was sitting with his back against a boulder, his ankle swollen to twice its size, his lips cracked. He stared at the monkey. The monkey was enormous - as tall as the man when he stood upright, with arms that could span the width of the gorge.

The monkey studied the man’s ankle. He brought him water in a broad leaf, then fruit from the vines that clung to the gorge walls. The man ate, drank, and wept.

The problem was simple. The man could not climb. His ankle would not hold him. The monkey could climb carrying the man, but the man was heavy - heavier than anything the monkey had carried before. So the monkey practiced. He found a stone roughly the man’s weight and hoisted it onto his back. He climbed one wall of the gorge with the stone, came down, climbed again. His arms shook. His grip slipped twice. But he learned the weight of it, and by the third ascent he could manage it without stopping.

He came back to the man and crouched, offering his back.

The Climb

The man wrapped his arms around the monkey’s neck and held on. The monkey climbed. Every handhold took effort - the man was not a stone, he shifted and gripped too tightly around the throat, and the monkey had to pause and adjust. The walls of the gorge were wet with moss. Twice the monkey’s foot slipped and they dropped a body-length before he caught a root. The man screamed both times. The monkey did not.

It took most of the morning. When they reached the top, the monkey set the man down on level ground among the sal trees, then collapsed. His arms trembled. His fingers bled where the rock had stripped the skin. He lay on his side, breathing hard, and within moments he was asleep.

The man sat beside him. His ankle throbbed. He was still hungry - the fruit in the gorge had not been enough, and he had not eaten properly in days. He looked at the monkey. The monkey was large. The monkey was meat.

The thought entered him the way such thoughts do - quietly, rationally. He was alone in the forest with a broken ankle. He did not know the way out. He might die before he found the road. The monkey was asleep. There was a stone within reach, flat and heavy enough.

He picked up the stone and brought it down on the monkey’s head.

The Stone

The blow did not kill the monkey-king. It split the skin above his eye and blood poured into his fur, but his skull held. He woke with a start, leaped backward, and crouched in the branches of a sal tree, bleeding, watching the man below.

The man still held the stone. His hands were red. He looked up at the monkey and something in his face broke - not remorse exactly, but the recognition of what he had just done. He dropped the stone.

The monkey-king looked down at him for a long time. Blood ran from his forehead and dripped onto the leaves. The man had tried to kill him. The man had eaten his fruit, drunk his water, ridden his back out of the gorge, and then, while he slept, tried to crush his skull for meat.

The monkey came down from the tree.

He did not strike the man. He did not bare his teeth. He turned and began walking through the forest, slowly, and as he walked he left a trail of blood on the ground behind him. He looked back once and waited until the man understood: follow.

The Trail of Blood

The man followed. He limped on his swollen ankle, using a branch as a crutch, and kept his eyes on the red drops that marked the monkey’s path. The monkey moved ahead at the pace the man could manage, stopping when the man stopped, waiting at difficult crossings where roots tangled or streams cut the trail.

They walked like that for the rest of the day. The monkey bled steadily. His gait grew uneven. Several times he sat and pressed leaves against the wound, then rose and continued.

By evening they reached the road. It was a proper road - packed earth, ruts from cart wheels, the smell of cook-fires somewhere ahead. The man would find a village before dark.

The monkey-king sat at the edge of the tree line. The man stood on the road and turned to look at him. The monkey’s golden fur was matted dark on one side, and his eyes were half-closed from swelling. He watched the man the way the man might watch a child who had done something terrible and did not yet understand it.

The man opened his mouth to speak - to thank him, perhaps, or to apologize - but the monkey had already turned back into the forest.

What the Buddha Said

When the Buddha finished telling this story to the assembled bhikkhus at Jetavana, he identified the beings. The man who struck the stone, he said, was Devadatta - his cousin, his rival, the one who had tried more than once to kill him in this present life as well. The monkey-king who bled and still led the way out was the Bodhisatta himself.

He did not explain the meaning. He did not need to. The bhikkhus sat in the vihara and the evening darkened around them, and no one asked what the story was for.