The Wise Monkey

At a Glance

• Central figures: The Bodhisatta, born as the leader of eighty thousand monkeys in the Himalayas; a king of Benares who marches his army to the riverbank to claim a mango tree; and the king’s chief archer.
• Setting: The slopes of the Himalayas near the bank of the Ganges, and the court of Benares, drawn from the Pali Jataka collection (Mahakapi Jataka, No. 407).
• The turn: When the king’s men surround the great mango tree to kill the monkeys, the Bodhisatta stretches his own body across the Ganges as a bridge so his troop can cross to safety.
• The outcome: The monkey-king’s back breaks under the weight of the crossing troop, and he dies in the arms of the king of Benares, who is so shaken he orders a funeral with royal honors.
• The legacy: The king of Benares ruled justly for the rest of his life, following the monkey-king’s example, and the story entered the Jataka canon as a teaching on the duty a leader owes to those in his care.

A mango fell into the Ganges. It floated downstream, past rocks, past the bathing ghats, past the rice paddies, and came to rest in the net of the king of Benares’s fishermen. The fruit was enormous - larger than any mango the fishermen had seen - and its smell was so sweet that they did not eat it themselves. They brought it to the king.

The king cut it open. He tasted it. He could not stop tasting it. He called his queens to taste it, and they could not stop either. When the fruit was gone the king summoned his foresters and asked where such a thing could grow.

The Tree on the Ganges

The foresters knew the tree. It stood on a high bank of the Ganges, far upstream, near the place where the river came down from the Himalayan foothills. Its trunk was broad enough for four men to link arms around, and its crown spread wide over the water. Mangoes the size of a man’s head hung from every branch. The foresters also knew that a great troop of monkeys lived in the tree and ate the fruit.

The king wanted more mangoes. He ordered his army to march upstream. They went by boat and by foot, archers and spearmen and elephants, and when they reached the tree at dusk the king saw the monkeys in its branches - thousands of them, dark shapes against the last light, eating his fruit.

He gave the order: surround the tree. At dawn, his archers would shoot every monkey in it.

The monkeys heard. They had heard the boats and the tramping feet and the elephants, and now they heard the bowstrings being tested. They ran to their leader, the great monkey - the Bodhisatta - who sat in the highest fork of the tree.

They will kill us all, they said. There is no way down. The soldiers are on every side.

The Bodhisatta looked across the river. On the far bank stood a tall bamboo. If a bridge could be made between the mango tree and that bamboo, the troop could cross the water and vanish into the forest on the other side.

The Bridge

He leaped. It was a leap no ordinary monkey could have made - across the full width of the Ganges at that point, which was not narrow. He caught the bamboo, bent it, and tied one end of a long vine to its top. The other end he tied around his own waist. Then he leaped back.

But he had misjudged the vine’s length. It was not quite long enough. When he landed on the mango tree he could not reach the nearest branch. He caught it with his hands, but the vine pulled taut against his waist, and his body hung stretched between the bamboo on the far bank and the mango tree on this one, suspended over the river. He was the bridge.

Go, he called down to the troop. Walk on my back. Cross to the far bank. Quickly.

Eighty thousand monkeys climbed onto his body and crossed. They stepped on his spine, his ribs, his legs, his outstretched arms. Some were careful. Many were not. The Bodhisatta said nothing. He held on.

One monkey - his name was Devadatta in a former life, the texts say - had always resented the Bodhisatta’s leadership. This monkey paused at the highest point of the bridge, which was the Bodhisatta’s back, and stamped down hard. Something cracked. The Bodhisatta’s grip on the branch did not loosen, but his body sagged.

The last of the eighty thousand crossed. The Bodhisatta hung alone over the water, his back broken.

The King at Dawn

The king of Benares had watched the whole thing. He had stood at the base of the mango tree with his archers drawn and had seen the great monkey leap, misjudge the vine, stretch himself across the gap, and hold while eighty thousand creatures walked over him. He had seen the one monkey stamp. He had heard the sound.

At dawn the king ordered his men to stretch a cloth beneath the Bodhisatta and lower him gently. They laid him on a soft pallet. The king brought water and washed the monkey’s face himself.

You are not their king, the king of Benares said. You are their slave. You have destroyed your body for their sake. Why?

The Bodhisatta opened his eyes. He spoke clearly, though his breath was short.

I am their leader. I am not their master. A leader’s body belongs to those he leads. I do not feel the weight of my kingdom as a burden. I feel it the way a parent feels the weight of a sleeping child.

He closed his eyes and did not open them again.

The Funeral by the River

The king of Benares ordered a funeral for the monkey-king with the full honors of a royal cremation. The body was wrapped in white cloth, anointed with sandalwood and camphor, and placed on a pyre of fragrant wood at the river’s edge. The army stood in ranks. The king himself lit the fire.

When the pyre had burned down, the king collected the bones and had a shrine built over them at the spot where the mango tree stood. He ordered that no monkey in the region was ever to be harmed.

Then he marched his army back to Benares. He did not take any mangoes with him.

The King Who Changed

Back in Benares, the king summoned his ministers and his priests. He told them what he had seen. He described the leap, the vine, the bridge of living flesh, the eighty thousand crossing, the one who stamped, and the words the dying monkey had spoken.

He asked his court poet to compose a verse, and the poet wrote:

Whose shoulders bear the weight of all his people - he is their chief. He does not wear a crown for its own sake.

The king had the verse inscribed on a pillar at the gate of the city. He revised his tax code. He opened granaries in years of drought. He did not go to war for the rest of his reign. When his ministers asked why he had changed, he said he had been taught by a monkey on a vine over the Ganges, and he was not ashamed of it.

The mango tree still bore fruit. The monkeys still ate it. No one disturbed them.