Vessantara's Great Giving

At a Glance

• Central figures: Prince Vessantara, the Bodhisatta in his final human birth before becoming the Buddha; his wife Maddi; his two children Jali and Kanhajina; the brahmin Jujaka; and the god Sakka.
• Setting: The Sivi kingdom and the forest of Mount Vanka, as told in the Vessantara Jataka, the last and longest of the 547 Jataka birth-stories in the Pali canon.
• The turn: Vessantara gives away the Sivi kingdom’s sacred rain-bringing elephant, provoking his exile, and then in the forest gives away his own children to a wandering brahmin.
• The outcome: King Sanjaya, Vessantara’s father, ransoms the children from Jujaka; Sakka tests Vessantara one final time by appearing as a brahmin to ask for Maddi, then returns her; the family is reunited and Vessantara is recalled to rule the Sivi kingdom.
• The legacy: The Vessantara Jataka is recited and performed across Theravada Buddhist cultures as the culminating perfection of generosity - the dana parami - that the Bodhisatta completed before his final birth as Siddhartha Gautama.

Vessantara could not refuse a request. He had never been able to. When he was eight years old and sitting in his upper room in the palace at Jetuttara, he had thought: if someone asked me for my eyes, I would give them. If someone asked for my flesh, I would cut it and hand it over. This was not a child’s fancy. He meant it the way a river means to run downhill.

He was the son of King Sanjaya of the Sivis, and he was generous the way other princes were brave or cunning. He gave gold, grain, horses, cloth. He gave without being asked. He gave when asked. He gave when asking would have been unreasonable, and he gave then too.

The White Elephant

The Sivi kingdom possessed a white elephant - an auspicious beast whose presence was said to bring rain. When the neighboring kingdom of Kalinga suffered drought, a delegation of eight brahmins came to Jetuttara and stood before Vessantara’s elephant as it was led through the streets. They asked for it.

Vessantara poured water over the brahmins’ hands - the ritual gesture of a completed gift - and gave them the elephant. He watched it walk away down the road toward Kalinga.

The people of the Sivi kingdom were furious. An auspicious elephant was not a bolt of cloth. It belonged to the kingdom, not to the prince. Crowds gathered outside the palace. They shouted that Vessantara would give away the walls of the city if someone asked politely enough. King Sanjaya had no choice. He ordered his son into exile.

Vessantara asked for one day. He spent it giving away everything he still possessed - seven hundred elephants, seven hundred horses, seven hundred chariots, hundreds of serving women and men, gold, silver, every fine thing in his household. He gave until he owned nothing but the clothes on his body.

The Road to Mount Vanka

Maddi would not stay behind. She took their son Jali and their daughter Kanhajina, and the four of them rode out of Jetuttara in a single chariot drawn by four horses. People lined the road, weeping. Vessantara drove the chariot himself.

On the road, four brahmins approached and asked for the horses. He unhitched them and gave them away. He and Maddi pulled the chariot themselves until another man came and asked for the chariot. Vessantara gave it. The family walked. They walked for days, the children riding on their parents’ hips, until they reached the forest at the foot of Mount Vanka. A god named Vissakamma had built a hermitage there - two leaf-roofed huts in a clearing. Vessantara and Maddi settled in, living on roots and wild fruit.

They lived quietly. Maddi foraged while Vessantara watched the children. Months passed. The forest was adequate. The children grew.

Jujaka

An old brahmin named Jujaka had a young wife. The young wife sent him to find Vessantara and ask for the two children as servants, because she was tired of fetching water from the well while the other village women mocked her for marrying an old man. Jujaka was not a good man, but he was obedient to his wife. He walked for weeks through the forest, asking directions, until he found the hermitage.

He came when Maddi was out foraging. This was not an accident. The god Sakka had arranged it - had sent Maddi deep into the forest so she would not be present to stop what happened next.

Jujaka stood before Vessantara and asked for Jali and Kanhajina.

Vessantara’s hands shook. He sat still for a long time. The children, seeing Jujaka, had run and hidden in a lotus pond, crouching in the water with only their faces showing. Vessantara called them out. They came to him wet and shivering. Jali asked his father why he was doing this.

Vessantara poured water over Jujaka’s hands and gave him the children. The earth shook. Jujaka tied Jali and Kanhajina with a vine rope and led them into the forest. The children looked back. Vessantara did not move from where he sat.

When Maddi returned that evening and found the children gone, she fainted. When she woke, Vessantara told her what he had done. She did not reproach him. She wept, and then she stopped weeping, and then she said she accepted it.

Sakka’s Final Test

Sakka was not finished. He took the form of a brahmin and came to the hermitage and asked for Maddi.

Vessantara gave her. He poured the water. Maddi stood beside the disguised god and did not speak. The giving of his wife was the thing that completed the dana parami - the perfection of generosity across uncountable lifetimes. There was nothing left he had not given.

Sakka revealed himself. He returned Maddi to Vessantara and praised him, and stood as guardian over the hermitage before departing.

The Ransoming

Jujaka, meanwhile, had lost his way in the forest and stumbled with the two children not toward his own village but toward Jetuttara - toward the Sivi capital. King Sanjaya saw his grandchildren bound with vine rope, led by a ragged old brahmin. He ransomed them immediately, paying Jujaka a fortune in gold.

Jujaka ate so much at the feast that followed that he died. The texts say this plainly.

Sanjaya sent a procession to the forest to bring Vessantara and Maddi home. Sixteen kings came in escort. When the family was reunited - Jali and Kanhajina running to their parents, Maddi holding them, Vessantara standing among the crowd that had once banished him - rain fell over the whole Sivi kingdom. It rained steadily for days.

Vessantara ruled after his father. He continued to give. In his next life - his last life - he was born as Siddhartha, in the Sakyan clan, in the foothills beneath the Himalayas. The perfection was complete. What remained was only the final step, and for that he would need a different kind of renunciation altogether: not the giving away of things, but the giving up of the self.