The Śākya Clan

Long ago there was a king named Ikṣvāku, who had four sons by concubines — all intelligent, martial, and possessed of great majesty — while his chief consort's own son was dull, unattractive, and held in contempt by all. The consort told the king that the four sons' very brilliance would draw the people's loyalty and, once factions formed around them, lead to mutual destruction and the kingdom's ruin; only banishing them would ease her mind. The king relented, and, though acknowledging his four sons had committed no fault, told them: "I cannot bear to see you die in the strife to come — leave the kingdom at once, each to make your own way, and do not look back in regret." The four sons obeyed; their mother and full sisters, along with many strongmen and commoners eager to follow, went with them. They settled by the Himalayas in a forest of straight trees, and within a few years their virtue drew people to them as though to a marketplace, growing into a great and flourishing kingdom. When their father later sent messengers summoning them home, they all declined and did not return. The king sighed three times: "My sons have shown they can establish themselves" — and from this the clan took the name Śākya, "able" (the traditions differ on the precise reason for the name, agreeing only that it commemorates this very moment). From this line descended, in succession, Ulkāmukha, Gotamaka, Siṃhahanu ("Lion-Jaw"), and finally Siṃhahanu's own four sons, the eldest of whom was Śuddhodana.

King Śuddhodana fell gravely ill, his joints seeming to come apart, his breath rasping like a rushing torrent, beyond any physician's help. Asked why he grieved, having never done evil and cultivated virtue without limit, the king answered that his only regret was not seeing Siddhārtha, Nanda, Ānanda, and Rāhula once more, and wept bitterly. The Buddha, then fifty yojanas away at Rājagṛha, knowing his father's failing state, flew through the air with Nanda and the others and appeared suddenly at Kapilavastu in a great light. The city's people, seeing this, wept that should the great king die, their whole nation would end, and rolled on the ground in grief before the Buddha, who told them that impermanence and separation have always been so, and that only the path itself is true amid the suffering of birth and death. His light shone into the king's own body, easing his suffering the moment it touched him — and, even before being told, the king sensed the Buddha and the others were arriving through the sky, and rose from his bed unconsciously in joy, begging the Tathāgata to touch him with his own hand, for his body ached as though being pressed like oil. The Buddha, comparing the king's once-renowned beauty and strength to his present wasted state, urged him toward reflection rather than sorrow, and reminded him of Māyā's own past vow that her four grandsons — the Buddha, Nanda, Ānanda, and Rāhula — would together destroy the net of Māra. The king, delighted, heard the Buddha expound the Jātaka of Amalapāla and attained the fruit of non-returning; pressing the Buddha's hand to his own chest, he heard further teaching and attained arhatship, his life then ending.

The Śākyas wailed in grief as the king's body was bathed, wrapped, and placed in a coffin adorned with the seven treasures, honored with flowers and incense, the Buddha and Nanda at its head, Ānanda and Rāhula at its feet. When Nanda and the others asked to carry the coffin themselves in memory of their father's own care, the Buddha, for the sake of unfilial beings yet to come, insisted on carrying it himself — and at this the great-thousandfold world shook, every mountain rocking like a boat on waves, as countless devas came to attend, the Four Heavenly Kings transforming into human form to bear it upon their own shoulders while the Buddha, his light like ten thousand suns, walked at the very front with an incense censer. At the burial ground, a thousand arhats from Gṛdhrakūṭa gathered wood in an instant, and, as the assembly cremated the coffin, the Buddha reminded the weeping mourners that all things are suffering, empty, and impermanent, like illusion, like the moon's reflection in water. The fire extinguished with milk, the bones were gathered into a vajra casket and a stūpa raised over them; asked where the king's spirit had been reborn, the Buddha answered: in the Pure Abodes (Source: Sūtra on King Śuddhodana's Nirvāṇa).

The Buddha ascended to Trāyastriṃśa Heaven and dwelt beneath the Pāricchattaka tree for the three-month rains retreat, emitting light from every pore. Sending Mañjuśrī to tell his mother he was there, he was confirmed by an unmistakable sign: Māyā's own milk began to flow of itself and, across the whole distance between them, reached directly into the Buddha's mouth. Overjoyed, feeling the earth shake and wondrous fruit ripen out of season, she went to him at once. Seeing her, the Buddha told her that any body one experiences is bound up with both suffering and joy, and that one should cultivate nirvāṇa to be free of it forever; prostrating herself with utmost sincerity, she subdued her own afflictions through his teaching, recalled her own past lives, and attained the fruit of stream-entry, declaring herself freed from the prison of birth and death. As the three months drew to a close, the Buddha told the young deva Kumāra he must descend to Jambudvīpa, for his own nirvāṇa was not far off — and the assembly grieved that the world's own eye would soon be extinguished. Śakra had spirits build a triple staircase of jewels, and the Buddha descended it step by step, Brahmā holding a canopy above him, the Four Heavenly Kings at his sides, and the fourfold assembly singing hymns of praise, as Māyā, weeping, took her leave (Source: Sūtra on the Buddha's Ascent to Trāyastriṃśa Heaven to Teach His Mother; also the Samantapāsādikā).

When the Buddha returned to Kapilavastu, Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī begged, three times over, to be allowed to go forth, but was refused each time; withdrawing outside the gate in soiled clothing, she wept. Ānanda, hearing she had heard women could attain the four fruits through diligent practice and that her own aspiration was sincere, interceded on her behalf — but the Buddha warned that admitting women would be like a household with many daughters and few sons, doomed to decline, or weeds mixed among good grain, spoiling the crop. Ānanda pointed out that Mahāprajāpatī had raised the Buddha himself from infancy; the Buddha acknowledged this debt, but noted he had likewise given her an even greater one — refuge in the Three Jewels, resolution of doubt, and the five precepts, a gift no material offering could match. He said that if women wished ordination, they must accept the Eight Special Rules without exception, for life, like a well-maintained dike holding back water — and under this condition alone, Mahāprajāpatī was ordained, becoming the first great bhikṣuṇī and, in time, an arhat. When she and other senior nuns later questioned why they must still bow to junior monks despite their own long practice and insight, the Buddha refused to revisit the matter, explaining that had women not been admitted at all, the heterodox teachers would have received the offerings and reverence now given his own sangha instead — "my true Dharma, which should have endured a thousand years, will now last only five hundred because women were admitted to it." Mahāprajāpatī accepted this without complaint (Source: Sūtra on the Buddha's Ascent to Trāyastriṃśa Heaven to Teach His Mother).

Dwelling at the Royal Park Monastery and about to give up her own life, Mahāprajāpatī said she could not bear to see a world without the Tathāgata and the noble ones, and wished to extinguish her own spirit first. The Buddha, perceiving this, told Ānanda, whose own body grew faint with grief. When the Buddha asked whether he supposed the Dharma itself was about to depart with her, Ānanda admitted he grieved only for her own kindness as a foster-mother; the Buddha acknowledged this debt, but noted the far greater one he had already repaid her — freeing her from every fetter through the Dharma itself. Mahāprajāpatī, with five hundred nuns, came to bid the Buddha farewell, then returned to her own monastery, where she and her five hundred companions performed the eighteen transformations and entered nirvāṇa together, their light shining even among the devas. Told of this, the lay community wept in grief, and Ānanda reminded them that even heaven and earth must have an end, and the three realms are impermanent as a dream. As they prepared the funeral offerings, a young novice, unaware her own teacher had died rather than merely entered meditation, collapsed in grief on learning the truth, lamenting that the sacred instruction was now silenced — but was reminded that even bonds of love must eventually end, and that she should resolve instead to attain the path herself. Once the cremation was complete, the relics were brought before the Buddha.

The Buddha had Ānanda summon arhats from all four directions, and two hundred fifty flew in from each; taking the relics into his own hands, the Buddha told the assembly: "This body, once ordinary, foolish, and violent, was nonetheless able to overcome that folly to accomplish the deeds of a true person, attaining the noble path — how admirable this is. Let us together raise a shrine and make offerings to her." All agreed (the Ekottarika Āgama records the Buddha personally gathering fragrant sandalwood with Nanda to prepare her body himself, declining Śakra's and Vaiśravaṇa's offers to spare him the trouble, and proclaiming that stūpas should be raised for four kinds of beings — a buddha, a pratyekabuddha, an arhat, and a wheel-turning king). The fourfold assembly, together with devas, nāgas, and spirits, each raised their own shrine in offering (Source: Sūtra on the Buddha's Mother's Nirvāṇa).

Prince Siddhārtha's consort Yaśodharā conceived on the very night he went forth, yet did not give birth for six years — matching the length of his own austerities. Accused by the Śākyas of impropriety, since the prince had already left, she insisted the child was truly his, though she herself could not explain the delay; Gopī vouched for her innocence, suggesting they wait until the birth to judge by the child's resemblance to its father. Rāhula was born the very night the Buddha attained enlightenment, and, seeing his clear resemblance, the king's own grief turned to delight. To finally clear Yaśodharā's reputation, on an occasion when the Buddha was invited to the palace, she had the seven-year-old Rāhula present him with a sweet cake — but the Buddha had transformed five hundred arhats to look exactly like himself, so that when Rāhula, not knowing which was the true Buddha, still went directly and unerringly to the real one, this itself proved his parentage, for as the disguise dissolved, only the true Buddha's bowl was found holding the cake. Asked why she had carried the child six years, the Buddha explained that Rāhula, in a past life as a king, had once delayed a supplicant seer's own confession — over a trivial debt of unauthorized water and a willow-twig — for six full days out of simple forgetfulness, and this delay resulted in six years spent in the womb in each of five hundred later lifetimes (Source: Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, chapter 17).

The Buddha sent Maudgalyāyana to Kapilavastu to persuade Rāhula's mother to release him for ordination — for the joy of a mother and son's bond is brief, and only Rāhula's own attainment of the path can truly deliver her from birth and death. Yaśodharā, hearing an envoy had come, barricaded herself and Rāhula in a high tower, but Maudgalyāyana simply flew up to her. Forced to receive him, she answered his request with bitter anger: the prince, having abandoned her within three years of marriage, showed no regard for his own family upon his triumphant return, treating her worse than a stranger — and now would take her son as well, in the name of a compassion she could not see. Even King Śuddhodana and Mahāprajāpatī's own repeated pleading could not move her, until the Buddha sent a conjured voice from the sky reminding her of an ancient vow: that when he, as a bodhisattva, had once bought flowers from her to offer Dīpaṃkara Buddha on the condition she be his wife in every future life, she herself had vowed that whatever kingdom, wife, or child should be born to her, she would let him give it away as he saw fit. Suddenly recalling this as vividly as yesterday, Yaśodharā's attachment eased at once; she summoned Maudgalyāyana back, confessed her fault, and entrusted Rāhula to him in tears. Fifty young Śākya nobles, sent by their own families to accompany the king's grandson, joined Rāhula in going to the Buddha, where Ānanda shaved their heads, Śāriputra served as preceptor, and Maudgalyāyana as instructor, giving them the ten precepts.

The Buddha told the fifty new novices the past-life karmic retribution of a figure named Chandāla, leaving them anxious that they, too, as unworthy children accepting others' offerings, might one day suffer likewise, and asked to return to lay life instead. The Buddha answered with a parable of two starving men who, given a fine meal, both overate — one, wise, induced vomiting and recovered, while the other, foolish, resorted to killing for a desperate cure and died in agony regardless. "You," the Buddha told them, "have the good fortune to have encountered me — take the medicine I offer, and you will not meet such a fate." Reassured, the novices settled into their new life; and when people later wondered how Gopī could have borne a son during the prince's own twelve-year absence, the Buddha assured his father of her flawless chastity throughout, and the seven-year-old Rāhula, asked who his father was, went straight to the Buddha and offered his mother's own signet ring as proof.

Before Rāhula attained the path, his character was rough and his speech unreliable. Sent by the Buddha to a monastery to guard his own speech and study diligently, he spent ninety days in shame and self-reproach before the Buddha visited him. The Buddha had him fetch water in a washbasin to wash his feet, then asked whether this water could now be drunk — Rāhula said no, since it had been soiled by the washing. "You are just the same," the Buddha said. "Though my own son and a king's grandson, if you do not guard your own mind and speech, the three poisons fill your heart just as this water is now fouled and unusable."

Asked next whether an empty basin — bearing that very name only because it once held impurity — could hold food, Rāhula again said no. "You are the same," said the Buddha: a monk of insincere speech and stubborn character, once he has earned a bad name, is unfit to hold anything worthwhile either. The Buddha then kicked the basin aside with his toe, and, asked whether Rāhula minded if it broke, Rāhula admitted it was a cheap thing hardly worth worrying over. "You are the same," the Buddha said again: a monk who does not guard his own body and speech will likewise be thought no more of by others than this basin — his own suffering, wandering through the evil destinies, unheeded even by buddhas and sages. Struck with fear and shame, Rāhula heard a final parable, of a war-elephant that protects its own soft, vulnerable trunk above all else in battle rather than fighting with it, just as a person must above all guard the mouth — and, deeply moved, exerted himself diligently and attained arhatship (Source: Sūtra of Similes, fascicle 10).

The Buddha's own half-brother Nanda, seeing him beg for food and thinking it beneath a would-be sage-king, insisted on delivering him a bowl of fine food himself — whereupon the Buddha had him confined for ordination by supernormal power. When his own turn came for a monastic chore, Nanda, delighted at the chance to slip home instead, found every task thwarted by unseen devas, and, giving up, tried to flee — only to run straight into the Buddha, who lifted an entire tree into the air to expose him hiding behind it. Confronted, Nanda admitted he meant to see his wife; the Buddha instead took him to see a heavenly palace, splendid but lacking any husband, which the heavenly maidens themselves explained awaited Nanda should he keep the precepts — and then to the edge of hell, where, having first made him compare his beautiful wife unfavorably to a blind monkey, then to the heavenly maidens by a billionfold, the Buddha showed him one great, ominously empty cauldron of boiling oil, which the hell-wardens explained awaited Prince Nanda himself, for his own excessive lust and pride. Terrified, Nanda begged to be freed from such a fate, and the Buddha's subsequent teaching brought him at last to genuine awakening (Source: Sūtra of a Child Questioning the Buddha About Almsgiving; also the Udānavarga, fascicle 16).

King Śuklodana (Śuddhodana's second younger brother) had two sons, Ānanda and Devadatta. Seeing that Kāśyapa's own followers were unattractive, King Śuddhodana urged the royal clan to join the sangha themselves, to add to its dignity — recalling Asita's own prophecy that the Buddha, had he not gone forth, would have ruled surrounded only by the finest attendants. Devadatta insisted the princes should first go forth in the very finest attire imaginable, and, on the appointed day of their splendid procession, a physiognomist predicted every prince but two would attain the path — yet all went together to the Buddha and were ordained regardless, their pride subdued without exception (Source: Zhong Ben Qi Sūtra, upper fascicle; also the Sūtra of the Buddha's Twelve Journeys).

King Droṇodana's son Aniruddha, weary of household affairs, negotiated his mother down from an impossible condition — that his own brother Bhaddiya go forth too — to eventually securing both their consents. When the group of Śākya princes finally departed, their attendant Upāli, rather than keeping the fine clothes and elephants they left him as payment, simply hung them on a tree for anyone to take, and asked to be ordained ahead of the princes himself, precisely to remove any future basis for pride of rank among them (Source: Dharmaguptaka Vinaya; the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra and the Sūtra of the Buddha's Twelve Journeys largely agree).

King Amṛtodana's son Bhaddiya, once ordained, was overheard meditating alone at night in a graveyard, crying out repeatedly, "How happy, how happy!" Asked by the Buddha the reason, Bhaddiya explained that as a prince he had lived constantly guarded by blades and staves yet still in fear, while now, alone among the dead with not a hair on his body standing on end in fright, he had found genuine freedom at last. The Buddha said, "Well done" (Source: Dharmaguptaka Vinaya; the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra and the Sūtra of the Buddha's Twelve Journeys largely agree).

King Prasenajit, newly enthroned, resolved to marry a Śākya woman, but the offended Śākyas, unwilling to join their noble line to a king they considered lesser, secretly sent instead the daughter of a slave-woman, dressed and presented as a true Śākya princess. The unwitting king made her his chief consort, and she soon bore a son of extraordinary beauty, whom the physiognomists — recalling the Śākyas' own hesitation over the marriage — named Virūḍhaka. At the age of eight, the prince was sent to study archery at Kapilavastu, staying with a group of Śākya youths; when he ascended the throne of a newly consecrated lecture hall there, the Śākyas present recognized him and, calling him "the slave-woman's son," dragged him out and threw him to the ground. The humiliated prince vowed revenge once he inherited the throne, and, once king, marched his army against the Śākya clan. Arriving at Kapilavastu, he found the Buddha himself waiting beneath a withered tree; asked why he sat there rather than beneath a better tree nearby, the Buddha answered that a kinsman's shade surpasses a stranger's — and the king, moved, withdrew out of respect, before being pressed by his own tutor to attack regardless.

Maudgalyāyana offered to move the entire Śākya clan bodily to safety — into the sky, the sea, another world entirely — but the Buddha told him that seven things no being can escape (birth, old age, sickness, death, offense, merit, and causal conditions) meant that no power could shield anyone from their own past karma. Undeterred, Maudgalyāyana nonetheless lifted four or five thousand Śākyas he knew personally into his own begging bowl and hid them among the stars. As the two armies met, the Śākyas' arrows shattered the enemy's own weapons and banners entirely yet somehow harmed no one — and the terrified King Virūḍhaka, reasoning the Śākyas could easily have killed him had they wished, ordered a retreat, only to be pushed onward again by his tutor's insistence that a clan too righteous to harm even an insect posed no real threat. The Śākyas, true to this, simply withdrew back into their city.

When a lone fifteen-year-old boy climbed the wall to defend the city and wounded many attackers, the Śākyas themselves scolded him for shaming their nonviolent principles — any one of them, they said, could easily defeat ten thousand enemies, but to kill even in self-defense would still mean rebirth in hell — and sent him away rather than let him fight further. When Māra himself, disguised as a Śākya, tricked the gates open, King Virūḍhaka had the Śākya men buried up to their legs and trampled by war-elephants, and selected five hundred Śākya women for himself. Mahānāma won one concession: that the Śākyas be allowed to flee for as long as he could remain submerged in a nearby pool, to be killed only once he resurfaced — but he instead tied his own hair to a tree root underwater and drowned himself deliberately, buying his people as much time as possible. Discovering this only once he was already dead, the king, grieving that his own maternal grandfather had died for love of his kin, regretted the entire campaign — too late, having by then already slain nearly a hundred million people, their blood flowing like a river around the city.

Maudgalyāyana, checking on the four or five thousand Śākyas he had hidden in his bowl by the Buddha's own power, found them all already dead regardless. The captured five hundred Śākya women, told by the king he would now be their husband, retorted in fury at being joined to "a slave-woman's son" — and the enraged king had their hands and feet cut off and cast into a pit. Returning to Śrāvastī, the king killed his own brother Prince Jeta with his own hand for refusing to have taken part in the campaign, though the Buddha revealed Jeta had been reborn in heaven for that very refusal. The maimed Śākya women, in their agony, called upon the Buddha's own name, lamenting that though born of his very clan they had received no aid from him — until the Buddha himself came to them, had Śakra cover their nakedness with heavenly robes and Vaiśravaṇa provide food for their hunger, and taught them the four truths, bringing them to the pure Dharma-eye before they died soon after and were all reborn in heaven.

Seeing the city now consumed in smoke and fire, the Buddha told his monks he would never return to a place now standing empty where he had once taught. Back at Jetavana, he predicted that King Virūḍhaka and his army would be destroyed within seven days — and, true to this, a sudden storm swept the celebrating king and his forces into a river and drowned them all on the seventh day, the king himself falling straight into the Avīci hell as heavenly fire consumed his own palace. Asked why the Śākyas had suffered such a fate, the Buddha explained: long ago, in a fishing village during a famine, villagers ate fish from a great pond, including two who protested being eaten though they were creatures of the water, while a village boy of eight, though he never fished himself, delighted in watching the catch. That village was the Śākya clan; the two fish were Virūḍhaka and his tutor; and the boy who laughed at the sight was the Buddha himself — for that offense he too suffered in hell for countless kalpas, and even now, as its last remaining trace, his own head aches at times as though crushed beneath the weight of Sumeru itself. Many in the assembly, hearing this teaching on impermanence, attained the fruit of stream-entry (Source: Sūtra on Śākyamuni's Own Exhausted Karmic Retribution; also the Dīrgha Āgama and Dharmapada with Similes).

One of the mutilated Śākya women recalled the Buddha's own teaching that anyone who, in dire extremity, single-mindedly invokes his name attains safety at once. All five hundred cried out together, "Homage to Śākyamuni!" amid their agony — and a cloud of compassion, through the power of the Tathāgata's own root of goodness, rained down and restored their severed hands and feet. Wishing to repay this kindness, they went to seek ordination, but a group of corrupt nuns, seeing how young and beautiful they still were, suggested they first enjoy worldly pleasure a while longer, hinting they should hand over their own robes and bowls should they ever return to lay life instead. Grieving at being urged back toward the very pleasures they now knew as poisoned food, the women wept aloud, until the nun Utpalavarṇā, learning they had been refused ordination, accepted them as her own disciples at once.

The grieving women, telling Utpalavarṇā their own story of clan-destruction and mutilation, were answered that their suffering was hardly worth mentioning beside her own past. Once a woman of Śrāvastī married into a northern land, she had been returning to her parents' home to give birth when a flooded river stranded her and her husband overnight — and a venomous serpent, drawn by the scent of fresh blood after she gave birth, killed their servant and then her husband as he slept. Alone for days beside her husband's rotting body, she attempted to cross the receding river carrying both children, only to lose her newborn to the current and her older child to a tiger while trying to save the other, arriving at the far shore to learn, from passing travelers, that her own parents' home had also burned down that same night, killing them both. Captured by bandits and forced to become one outlaw's wife, she was later accused by him of endangering him through a secretly born child, whereupon he mutilated her and forced her to eat the child's own flesh; buried alive alongside him after his own execution, she was twice dug up — once by a grave-robber after her jewelry, once inadvertently by a scavenging tiger — before wandering, half-mad, until she found her way to Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī and, practicing under her in due order, finally attained the fruit of the path.

Hearing this, the Śākya women rejoiced and attained the pure Dharma-eye. Mahāprajāpatī then reflected on her own history securing this very path for women — how the Buddha had at first refused her, on the grounds that women's minds, clouded by attachment, could not adorn themselves with awakening; how Ānanda's advocacy on her behalf, citing her own care for the infant Buddha, had won only the concession that admitting women would hasten the Dharma's own decline; and how she had finally been admitted solely on condition of the Eight Special Rules, her own great compassion thereby extending, through this precedent, to every woman of future generations. She now asked the Buddha, on behalf of all such future women, to confirm this path remained open, and the Buddha answered that any woman who protects the Dharma and studies it in proper order — precepts, giving, learning, and full ordination together with every aid to the path — should likewise be admitted, and that all such women should forever remember Ānanda's own debt of kindness in this, honoring him without fail (Source: Sūtra of Repaying Kindness, fascicle 5).

Śāriputra asked the Buddha what merit Chandaka had earned in a past life, that he alone should accompany the bodhisattva into the mountains on the night of his great departure. The Buddha explained: long ago, when I was myself a bodhisattva, King Sudarśana of Siṃhapura, wishing to ascend to heaven bodily, was told by a brahmin advisor that he must perform a great sacrifice — a hundred handsome young men and women, and a hundred each of elephants and horses, their blood used to build a ceremonial staircase. The brahmin further demanded the blood of a forest-spirit maiden named Candrā, dwelling in the Fragrant Mountains. Two men, Jāli and his companion, who knew her whereabouts, were summoned, richly rewarded, and sent to capture her.

After crossing eight mountain ranges over two months, they found Candrā bathing with Śakra and countless heavenly maidens at a pool in the Fragrant Mountains, guarded nearby by a brahmin ascetic of the fourth dhyāna. Unable to approach a being so clearly under divine protection, one of the men devised a binding spell using a knotted blade of grass cast into the water — and when Śakra and the other maidens flew back to heaven as usual, Candrā alone, along with the guardian brahmin and a royal attendant, remained trapped, unable to fly. The two men seized her and brought her back to their own kingdom, where the king received them with a feast.

The king's own compassionate grandson-prince, wishing to marry Candrā instead of seeing her sacrificed, threatened to die of longing if refused, and the fearful king relented. Months later, when the brahmin returned to demand her sacrifice after all, the prince exposed his advisor's self-serving scheme so precisely that the shamed brahmin departed, and instead taught the king that true ascent to heaven comes only through the precepts, the ten good deeds, generosity, filial devotion, and compassion toward every living creature. Persuaded, the king gave freely from his own treasury for seven days, and the prince, with his new wife, then returned to his own country.

But after a year of neglecting his royal duties, the prince's own ministers demanded Candrā's sacrifice regardless, forcing her to flee before he could be seized — though not before she left her signet ring with Jāli's companion as a signal for the pursuing prince. Guided by a spirit's counsel and equipped with pearl-armor, the prince tracked her back through the same eight mountains, meeting the terrifying monkey (Śakra in disguise) who, once coaxed down and fed by the guardian brahmin, agreed to guide the party onward. Passing five hundred pratyekabuddhas along the way, all three travelers made their own vows before them — the prince to swiftly attain buddhahood, the monkey to become his future horse, and each companion to become his future servant or an arhat. Arriving at last at Candrā's own home, the prince slipped his ring into her bathwater, and she, recognizing it, ran to tell her overjoyed parents; the reunited couple was welcomed and entrusted to each other for seven more years.

When the prince finally asked to return to his own parents, a demon-king, arriving to congratulate the family on Candrā's return, agreed to carry the entire party home himself, delivering them safely in a moment. The Buddha then revealed the identities behind every figure in the story: "The prince was myself; the brahmin of the fourth dhyāna was Śāriputra; Jāli was Chandaka; the companion who vowed to become an arhat was Maudgalyāyana; the transformed monkey who vowed to become my horse was Kaṇṭhaka; my own father Śuddhodana was that old king; my mother Māyā was the queen; and Candrā herself was Gopī" (Source: Sūtra of Chandaka).