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Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Buddhist Scriptures: XVI. Birth-Story of the City with Four Gates

Buddhist Scriptures AnthologyLife of the BuddhaWisdom of the East Series

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This is a translated Buddhist canonical text — a Jataka tale (No. 439) from the Pali tradition, compiled by E.J. Thomas in 1913 — a genre of story recounting past lives of the Buddha (here as the Bodhisatta, king of the gods) to illustrate moral teaching. The story follows Mittavindaka, a wealthy merchant's son who defies his mother, abandons religious obligations, and is cast adrift at sea, after which he encounters progressively larger groups of female spirits living in palatial islands before stumbling into the Ussada hell. There, blinded by craving, he mistakes a razor-wheel instrument of torture for a lotus flower, seizes it from a suffering soul, and is condemned to bear it himself — a vivid karmic inversion where desire literally becomes suffering. The Bodhisatta appears to explain that each island represented an escalating temptation, and that greed alone drove Mittavindaka to his fate; the punishment lasts a full hellish "lifetime" proportional to his karma. Distinctive is Thomas's editorial note explicitly comparing these Buddhist hell-realms to the Christian concept of hell while insisting on a key difference: Buddhist punishment is finite, not eternal. The frame narrative ties the moral directly to the audience — the Master reveals that the disobedient monk being addressed *is* Mittavindaka reborn, making the story a pointed personal warning rather than abstract doctrine.

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