Jataka 190
Sīlānisaṃsa Jātaka
The Fruits of Virtue
as told by Eric Van Horn
originally translated by William Henry Denham Rouse, Cambridge University
originally edited by Professor Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge University
So often we see the Buddha emphasize the important of good friendship! We are all gardens, with weeds and flowers, admirable and not-so-admirable qualities. Some people water our flowers, and some water our weeds.
This is a lovely, particularly fantastic tale of devotion and faith. This is a part of Buddhism that is not very popular in the west. We love our doubt and skepticism. But faith alone – the Pāli Canon tells us – can lead to awakening. Faith becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. And if all you have is doubt and skepticism, you will never reach the far shore.
“Behold the fruit of faith.” The Master told this story while he was staying at Jetavana. It is about a layman with great faith. He was a faithful, devoted person, and an admirable disciple.
One evening when he was on his way to Jetavana, he came to a bend in the river Aciravatī. Ferrymen had pulled their boat up onto the shore in order to service it. There were no other boats at the landing to carry him across the river. But our friend’s mind was so full of delightful thoughts of the Buddha, he walked right into the river. But his feet never sank into the water. He got as far as the middle of the river walking as though he were on dry land. Then his rapture was interrupted by the sound of the waves. As soon as his rapture was broken, his feet began to sink into the water. But he was able to regain his sense of rapture with thoughts of the Buddha, and in this way he continued to walk on the water to the far shore.
When he arrived at Jetavana, he greeted the Master and took a seat on one side. The Master entered into a conversation with him pleasantly. “I hope, good layman,” he said, “that you did not have any mishaps on your way here.”
“Oh, Sir,” he replied, "when I was on my way here I was so absorbed in thoughts of the Buddha that I set foot on the river, but I walked over it as though it was dry ground!”
“Ah, friend layman,” the Master said, “you are not the only one who was kept safe by remembering the virtues of the Buddha. In days gone by devoted laymen were shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean, and they saved themselves by remembering the Buddha’s virtues.” Then, at the man’s request, he told this story of the past.
Once upon a time, in the days when Kassapa was the Supreme Buddha (Kassapa is the 27th of the 29 Buddhas named in the Buddhavamsa), there was a disciple who had entered on the noble eightfold path. He took passage on board a ship in the company of a barber of considerable wealth. (This is a bit of a cultural oddity. Barbers were considered to be among those with the lowest social status in India.) The barber’s wife had put him under the care of our friend, to look after him in better and in worse.
After they had been on the ship for a week, the ship was wrecked in the middle of the ocean. The barber and our friend clung to a plank from the wrecked ship. Finally they were cast up onto an island. There the barber killed some birds. He cooked them and offered a share of his meal to the lay brother. “No, thank you,” he said, “I have had enough.” He was thinking to himself, “In this place there is no help for us except the Three Jewels (the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṇgha) and so he contemplated the blessings of the Three Jewels. As he continued his contemplation, a nāga (serpent god who had been born on the island changed his body into the shape of a great ship. The ship was filled with the seven kinds of precious things (gold, silver, pearl, coral, catseye, ruby, and diamond). The helmsman was a Spirit of the Sea. The three masts were made of sapphire, the anchor was made of gold, the ropes were silver, and the planks were gold.
The Spirit of the Sea stood on board, crying, “Are there any passengers bound for India?”
The lay brother said, “Yes, that’s where we are going.”
“In with you then - on board with you!”
He went aboard, and he wanted to call to his friend the barber. “You may come,” the helmsman said, “but he may not.”
“Why not?”
“He is not a man of the holy life, that’s why,” said the Spirit. “I brought this ship for you, but not for him.”
“Very well,” the layman said. “The gifts that I have given, the virtues I have practiced, the powers that I have developed, I give the fruit of all of them to him!”
“I thank you, master!” the barber said.
“Now,” the Spirit of the Sea said, “I can take you on board.”
Figure: The Devoted Disciple and the Spirit of the Sea
So he took them both over the sea and sailed upstream to Benares. There, by his power, he created an abundance of wealth for both of them. Then he said to them, “Keep company with the wise and good. If you, barber, had not been in company of this devout layman, you would have perished in the midst of the ocean.” Then he uttered these verses in praise of good company:
“Behold the fruit of sacrifice, virtue, and devotion,
A nāga as ship conveys the good man o’er the ocean.
“Make friendship only with the good, and keep good company,
Friends with the good, this barber could his home in safety see.”
Thus did the Spirit of the Sea hold forth, poised in mid-air. Finally he went back to his own home taking the nāga with him.
The Master, after finishing this discourse, taught the Four Noble Truths. At the end of this discourse the devoted layman entered on the Fruit of the Second Path (once-returner), and the Master identified the birth: “Sāriputta was the nāga, and I was the Spirit of the Sea.”
