Sacred Texts: Buddhism

The Jataka, Vol. II: Book II. Dukanipāta: No. 159. Mora-Jātaka

Buddha's Previous LivesJataka TalesPali Text Society

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This is a Jataka tale — a Buddhist birth story from the Pali canon — here presented in W.H.D. Rouse's 1895 English translation. The framing narrative has the Buddha telling the story to a monk who has backslid after being tempted by a woman in fine dress; the tale is meant to show that even the wise can fall when desire catches them unguarded. In the story itself, the Bodhisatta (the Buddha in a former life) is born as a golden peacock who protects himself each day with recited charms, but is ultimately captured when a hunter uses a peahen's cry to distract him before he can complete his morning spell — the direct parallel to the monk undone by a woman's appearance. Brought before a king who wants to eat him for eternal youth, the peacock dismantles the folk belief: his golden color comes from past virtue (keeping the Five Commandments), not from any magical property his flesh could transfer. He then delivers the story's core Buddhist teaching — that all composite things are impermanent and insubstantial, with only Nirvana being everlasting — and converts the king to the precepts. The tale is distinctive in how tightly it integrates its doctrinal argument (impermanence, the causality of karma) with its narrative logic: the peacock's capture and his rebuttal of immortality claims both turn on the same point about the limits of the material world.

The Jataka, Vol. II: Book II. Dukanipāta: No. 159. Mora-Jātaka

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