Sacred Texts: Buddhism

The Jataka, Vol. III: No. 352.: Sujāta-Jātaka.

Buddha's Previous LivesJataka TalesPali Text Society

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This is a Jataka tale — a story from the Pali Buddhist canonical collection recounting a past life of the Buddha (here called the Bodhisatta) — specifically from Volume III of the 1897 English translation. The framing story has the Buddha visiting a grieving landowner in Sāvatthi and redirecting him through a teaching tale set in ancient Benares, where the Bodhisatta (born as a young man named Sujāta) uses an absurdist intervention to cure his father's paralyzing grief over a dead grandfather. Rather than arguing directly, Sujāta ostentatiously offers grass and water to a dead ox until alarmed onlookers fetch his father — at which point the father's grief shifts from the grandfather to his apparently mad son, breaking the original mourning entirely. When confronted, Sujāta draws the parallel explicitly: just as feeding a dead ox is futile, so is the father's continued lamentation over cremated bones. The tale's distinctive claim is that grief is best dissolved not through philosophical argument but through strategic absurdity that forces the mourner to recognize their own irrationality; the father's healing is narrated as instantaneous once the parallel lands. The story closes with the frame narrative confirming its efficacy: the landowner in Sāvatthi attains the "Fruit of the First Path" (a stage of Buddhist soteriological progress) upon hearing it.

The Jataka, Vol. III: No. 352.: Sujāta-Jātaka.

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