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Jataka 262

Mudu Pāṇi Jātaka

The Soft Hands

as told by Eric Van Horn

originally translated by William Henry Denham Rouse, Cambridge University

originally edited by Professor Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge University


This is a story that the redactors chose to give a mildly misogynistic spin. When you leave that out, it ends up being a story about love and forgiveness, even if that love is incestuous!


A soft hand.” The Master told this story at Jetavana. It is about a back-sliding monk. They brought him to the Dharma Hall where the Master asked him if he were really a backslider. He replied, yes, he was. Then the Master said, “Oh brother! It is impossible to keep women from chasing after their desires. In past days, even wise men could not guard their own daughters. Even while they stood holding their father’s hand, without their father’s knowing they went away doing mischief with a paramour.” And he told them this story from the past.


Once upon a time, when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as the son of his Queen Consort. When he grew up, he was educated at Takkasilā University. When his father died, he became the King in his stead, and he reigned righteously.

Living with him were a daughter and a nephew. One day as he sat with his court, he said, “When I am dead my nephew will be King, and my daughter will be his chief Queen.”

But later, when they had grown up, he was sitting again with his court. He said to them, “I will bring home some other man’s daughter for my nephew, and my own daughter I will marry into another king’s family. In this way I shall have many relatives.” The courtiers agreed. So the King assigned a house outside the palace to the nephew and forbid him from coming to the palace.

But these two were in love with each other. The youth thought, “How can I get the King’s daughter outside the house? Ah, I have it.”

He gave a present to the nurse.

“What am I to do for this, master?” she asked.

“Well, mother, I want to get a chance to bring the princess out of the palace.”

“I will talk it over with the princess,” she said, “and report back to you.”

“Very good, mother,” he replied.

So she went to see the princess. “Let me pick the insects out of your head,” she said.

She had the princess sit on a low stool, and she sat on a higher one. She put the princess’s head on her lap, and in looking for the insects, she scratched the princess’s head. The princess understood. She thought, “She has scratched me with my cousin—the prince’s—nail, not her own. “Mother,” she asked, “have you been with the prince?”

“Yes, my daughter.”

“And what did he say?”

"He asked how he could find a way of getting you out of the palace.”

“If he is wise, he will know,” the princess said. And she recited the first stanza, instructing the old woman to learn it and repeat it to the prince:

“A soft hand, and a well-trained elephant,

a black rain-cloud, gives you what you want.”

The woman learned it and returned to the prince.

“Well, mother, what did the princess say?” he asked.

“Nothing, but she only sent you this stanza,” she replied, and she repeated it. The prince listened to it and dismissed her.

The prince understood exactly what the stanza meant. He found a beautiful and soft-handed page and prepared him. He bribed the keeper of a state elephant, and having trained the elephant to be tranquil, he bided his time. Then, on a day of fasting just after the middle watch, rain fell from a thick black cloud. “This is the day the princess meant,” he thought. He mounted the elephant, placed the lad with the soft hands on its back, and set out. Across from the palace he fastened the elephant to the great wall of an open courtyard, and he stood before a window getting drenched.

Now the King watched his daughter. He did not let her rest anywhere but on a little bed when she was in his presence. She thought to herself, “Today the prince will come!” and she lay down without going to sleep.

“Father,” she said, “I want to bathe.”

“Come along, my daughter,” the King said. Holding her hands, he led her to the window. He lifted her and placed her on a lotus ornament outside it, holding her by one hand. As she bathed herself, she held out a hand to the prince. He removed the bangles from her arm and fastened them on the arm of his page boy. Then he lifted the lad and placed him on the lotus beside the princess. She took his hand and placed it in her father’s. He took it and let go of his daughter’s hand. Then she removed the ornaments from her other arm and fastened them to the other hand of the lad. She also placed that hand in her father’s, and away she went with the prince. The King thought the lad was his daughter. When the bathing was over, he put him to sleep in the royal bedchamber, shut the door, and set his seal on it. Then he set a guard, retired to his own chamber, and lay down to rest.

When daylight came, he opened the door and there he saw this lad. “What's this?” he cried. The lad told how she had fled along with the prince. The King was despondent. “Not even if one goes along and holds hands,” the King thought, “can one guard a woman. Women are impossible to guard.” And he uttered these other two stanzas:

“Though soft of speech, like rivers hard to fill,

Insatiate, nought can satisfy their will.

Down, down they sink, a man should flee afar

From women, when he knows what kind they are.

Who they serve for gold or for desire,

They burn him up like fuel in the fire.”

So saying, the King added, “I must support my nephew.” So with great honor he gave his daughter to this very man and made him a viceroy. And the nephew at his uncle’s death became King himself.

Foregiveness

Figure: Foregiveness


When the Master ended this discourse, he taught the Four Noble Truths, at the conclusion of which the backsliding monk became established in the fruit of stream-entry. Then he identified the birth: “In those days, I was the King.”

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