The King of Shibis

At a Glance

• Central figures: King Sivi (the Bodhisatta, in a former life), Sakka (king of the devas, disguised as a blind Brahmin), and Sujampati (a deva disguised as a hawk and a pigeon).
• Setting: The kingdom of the Shibis (Sivis), with its capital at Aritthapura, in ancient India; drawn from the Jataka collection of the Pali canon.
• The turn: A blind Brahmin approaches King Sivi and asks for the king’s own eyes as a gift, and the king agrees without hesitation.
• The outcome: Sivi has both eyes cut from his head by a surgeon and gives them to the Brahmin; he loses his sight entirely and retires to a garden, where Sakka restores his vision.
• The legacy: Sivi’s act became one of the canonical examples of dana paramita - the perfection of generosity - recounted wherever the Jataka tales are taught as the measure of what a Bodhisatta will sacrifice.

King Sivi of the Shibis had given away everything a man can give away and still be king. He had given gold, grain, cattle, horses, elephants, carriages, robes, food, medicine. He had given the contents of his treasury and the contents of his granaries. He had given to anyone who came to the palace gate and asked. And every morning, sitting on his throne after the giving was done, he felt the same dissatisfaction - the sense that he had not yet given enough.

He said it aloud once, to no one in particular: “I have given everything external to my body. If someone asked for my eyes, I would give them.”

Sakka, king of the thirty-three devas, heard this. He had heard such statements before, from other kings in other lifetimes. Most of them were rhetoric. He wanted to know if Sivi meant it.

The Blind Brahmin at the Gate

The next morning a blind Brahmin appeared at the alms-hall. He was old, stooped, led by a boy, and he walked past the tables of food and the piles of cloth without stopping. The attendants tried to direct him. He shook his head.

“I have not come for rice,” he said. “I have come to see the king.”

They brought him to Sivi. The Brahmin stood before the throne and said nothing for a moment, his empty eye sockets turned toward the king’s face as though he could feel it there.

“Great king, I was born blind. I have never seen the sun, or a tree, or my own son’s face. I have heard that you give whatever is asked of you. I ask for your eyes.”

The court went silent. Sivi’s ministers looked at one another. The eldest among them, a man named Sivaka, stepped forward and said quietly that this was not a reasonable request - that the king could give the Brahmin wealth enough to live a hundred lives, servants to guide him, medicines from every physician in the kingdom.

Sivi raised his hand.

“He did not ask for wealth,” Sivi said. “He asked for my eyes.”

Sivaka’s Objection

Sivaka pressed the matter. He was not a timid man and he had served Sivi’s father before him. He said that a king without eyes cannot govern, cannot lead an army, cannot read a treaty, cannot recognize a traitor from a friend. He said that the kingdom depended on the king’s body remaining whole.

Sivi listened to all of it. Then he said: “Sivaka, I have made a vow. I said I would give my eyes if they were asked for. They have been asked for. If I refuse now, every gift I have ever given becomes a lie. Bring me the surgeon.”

Sivaka sent for the court physician. The physician came, examined the king’s eyes, and said he could remove them cleanly. His hands were shaking. Sivi noticed and told him to be steady - that what he was doing was not a harm but a gift, and the physician would bear no fault for it.

The Surgeon’s Work

The surgeon used a tool called a salaka - a fine surgical probe. He worked on the right eye first. Sivi sat on the throne and did not move. The surgeon cut the eye free and placed it in a lotus-leaf cup that a servant held out. Blood ran down Sivi’s cheek and into his beard. The pain was enormous. Sivi held still.

He gave the right eye to the blind Brahmin.

The Brahmin placed it against his own empty socket. The eye took hold. It opened. The Brahmin saw. He looked at the king’s face - the blood, the remaining eye, the calm expression - and he said nothing. He did not thank the king. He did not weep. He held out his hand again.

The surgeon removed the left eye. Sivi gave it. The Brahmin placed it and now had two good eyes, both of them another man’s. He looked at the world he had never seen before - the pillars of the hall, the silk hangings, the stunned faces of the ministers - and walked out of the palace without a word.

Sivi sat in darkness. Blood pooled in the lotus-leaf cups where his eyes had rested. Sivaka wiped the king’s face and led him, by the arm, to his chambers.

The Garden at Aritthapura

Sivi did not remain on the throne. A blind king, as Sivaka had predicted, could not govern in the way the Shibis needed. Sivi appointed a regent and retired to a mango garden outside the walls of Aritthapura, where he lived simply, attended by a single servant who brought him food and water.

He sat beneath the trees and listened. He listened to the birds and the wind and the footsteps of people passing on the road outside the garden wall. He did not regret what he had done. He also did not pretend the darkness was easy. It was not easy. The world he had seen for sixty years was gone, replaced by a blackness that did not thin or shift. He sat with it the way a person sits with grief - patiently, without fighting it, knowing it would not lift.

Days passed. Weeks. Sivi grew thinner. He ate what was brought to him but without interest.

Sakka’s Revelation

Sakka had watched long enough. He came down from the deva realm and stood before Sivi in the garden, visible now, shining, attended by other devas. Sivi could not see any of it.

“King of the Shibis,” Sakka said. “I was the blind Brahmin. I came to test whether your vow was real. It was real. Ask for anything. I will grant it.”

Sivi said: “I did not give my eyes to earn a reward.”

Sakka waited.

“But if you are offering,” Sivi said, “I would like to see again.”

Sakka told him to make a declaration of truth - an Asseveration, a solemn statement staking the speaker’s merit on its accuracy. If the statement was true, the merit would take visible form.

Sivi said: “Whether the man who came to me was a beggar or a Brahmin or a deva, I gave my eyes with the same willingness. I gave them without anger, without regret, without hope of return. If this is true, let my sight be restored.”

His eyes returned. Not the old ones - new ones, clear, sharper than what he had lost. He saw the garden, the mango trees heavy with fruit, the deva standing before him in a light that made the afternoon dim by comparison. He saw his own hands, thinner than he remembered.

Sakka left. Sivi walked back through the gate of Aritthapura. The people of the Shibis lined the road. He could see every face.