The Patient Prince

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as Prince Khantivadi, and a king of Benares who ordered his mutilation.
• Setting: The kingdom of Benares (Varanasi), in a royal park where the prince had taken up the life of an ascetic; from the Pali Jataka collection (Khantivadi Jataka, No. 313).
• The turn: The king, drunk and jealous, demanded the ascetic renounce his teaching on patience; when the ascetic refused, the king ordered his hands, feet, nose, and ears cut off.
• The outcome: The ascetic did not speak a single word of anger through the mutilation, and the earth opened and swallowed the king alive.
• The legacy: The Bodhisatta’s endurance in this life became one of the primary examples of khanti-paramita - the perfection of patience - cited in Buddhist teaching as proof that the virtue can be practiced even unto death.

The women of the king’s court had gone to the royal park to enjoy themselves. They spread cloth on the grass and drank and laughed and called for music, and by midday the king had not yet joined them. So they wandered. Under a great sal tree at the far edge of the park they found a man sitting cross-legged, very still, wearing robes pieced together from rags. His hair was matted. His bowl sat empty beside him.

They sat down in front of him and asked who he was.

He told them his name was Khantivadi - the Teacher of Patience. He had been a prince once, the son of a king in a neighboring country, but he had given up the succession and gone into the forest. Now he lived on alms and taught one thing only: patience. Not patience as mere waiting, but patience as the refusal to return harm for harm, the discipline of holding the mind still when every nerve cried out.

The women listened. They asked questions. They forgot the king entirely.

The King in the Garden

The king of Benares woke from his afternoon sleep and found his entertainments abandoned - the wine cups half-full, the musicians sitting idle. He asked where the women had gone. A servant pointed toward the far end of the park.

He walked out there with his sword on his hip and his guards behind him. He found the women sitting in a half-circle around a ragged ascetic, leaning forward, absorbed. The king’s face went hot.

He pushed through the circle and stood over the seated man.

What do you teach?

Khantivadi looked up at him without standing.

“I teach patience, great king.”

Patience. The king repeated it like a word in a language he did not speak. He looked at the women, who had drawn back but had not left. He looked at the ascetic’s calm face.

“And what is patience?”

“Not to return anger for anger. Not to return blow for blow. To hold the mind still when the body is struck.”

The king drew his sword halfway from its sheath.

“We will see.”

The First Cut

He ordered a soldier to bring a whip. The soldier struck Khantivadi across the back. The ascetic did not move. The king bent down close.

Still patient?

“Still patient, great king. Patience does not live in my skin. You can cut the skin away and patience will still be here.”

The king took this as an invitation. He ordered the royal executioner brought from the city. The man came with his tools. The king pointed at Khantivadi’s hands.

“Cut them off.”

The executioner hesitated. The ascetic was unarmed, seated, unresisting. The king repeated the order. The executioner obeyed.

Khantivadi’s hands fell into the grass. Blood ran over the roots of the sal tree. The ascetic’s face did not change. He did not cry out. He did not close his eyes.

“Where is your patience now?” the king asked.

“Where it was before. In a place your sword cannot reach.”

The king ordered the feet cut off. They were cut off. Then the nose. Then the ears. At each mutilation the king asked the same question, and at each mutilation the ascetic gave the same answer, quieter each time as his body weakened, but steady.

The Earth Opens

Blood soaked the ground around the sal tree. Khantivadi sat in what remained of his body, upright, breathing in shallow draws. The women had fled. Several of the soldiers had turned their faces away. The executioner stood with his blade at his side and would not look at the king.

The king crouched in front of the ascetic one last time.

Do you hate me?

Khantivadi’s voice came from a long way off. It was not faint because of weakness alone - it had the quality of a voice speaking across a great distance, from somewhere the king could not follow.

“If I have felt even one moment of anger toward you, may my body never heal. But I have not. May you be well, great king. May you find what you are looking for.”

The king stood up. He opened his mouth to speak again, and the ground beneath him broke. It did not crack slowly. It opened like a jaw - one moment solid earth, the next moment nothing. The king dropped through it. The earth closed over him. The grass settled. A bird called from somewhere in the park, and then another.

Under the Sal Tree

The ascetic’s attendants - two young monks who had hidden in the trees during the mutilation - ran to him. They wrapped his stumps and lifted his head and brought water to his lips. Khantivadi drank a little. He looked at the place where the king had stood. There was no mark on the ground.

“Do not hate him,” Khantivadi said. “He was afraid. People who are afraid do terrible things. That is why patience matters - not because it protects us, but because anger is its own executioner. It would have destroyed me faster than any blade.”

He lived through that night and into the next morning. His attendants carried him on a litter back toward the edge of the city, hoping to find a physician, but by midday his breathing had stopped. They cremated him at the edge of the sal forest where he had taught.

What the Buddha Said

Many lives later, when the being who had been Khantivadi sat under the Bodhi tree at Gaya and became the Buddha, he told this story to his monks. A certain monk had lost his temper at a fellow monk over a trivial slight - a borrowed robe returned with a stain. The quarrel had escalated until neither would speak to the other, and the rest of the Sangha had begun taking sides.

The Buddha called them together.

He told them about the prince who became an ascetic, and the king who could not bear that an unarmed man commanded more attention than a king with a sword. He told them about the hands and the feet and the nose and the ears. He told them about the ground opening.

Then he said: “Monks, I was that ascetic. And if I could hold my patience while my body was cut apart, can you not hold yours over a stained robe?”

The two monks looked at each other. They bowed to the Buddha. They bowed to each other. The quarrel ended there, in the shade of the teaching hall at Jetavana, over nothing more than the memory of a sal tree and the sound of the earth closing shut.