BANDHANAGĀRA JĀTAKA
This story the Master told while staying at Jetavana, about the prison-house.
At that time, it is said, a band of burglars, highwaymen, and murderers had been captured and brought before the king of Kosala. The king ordered them to be bound fast with chains, ropes, and fetters. Meanwhile, thirty country brethren, desiring to see the Master, had come to visit him and offer their salutations.
The next day, as they went on their alms-round, they passed by the prison and saw these criminals. In the evening, after returning from their round, they approached the Buddha and said:
“Sir, today as we went for alms we saw in the prison-house a number of criminals bound fast in chains and fetters, suffering greatly. They could not break free and escape. Is there any fetter stronger than these?”
The Master replied:
“Brethren, those are fetters indeed; yet the fetters of craving—for wealth, grain, sons, wives, and children—are stronger still, a hundredfold, nay, a thousandfold. And yet, even those fetters, hard as they are to break, have been sundered by wise men of old who left the world, went to the Himalayas, and became anchorites.”
Then he told them an old-world tale.
Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born into a poor man’s family. When he grew up, his father died, and he earned wages to support his mother. Against his will, his mother brought a wife home for him, and soon afterward she herself passed away. Not long after, his wife conceived.
Unaware that she was with child, he said to her:
“Wife, you must earn your living; I will renounce the world.”
But she replied:
“Nay, for I am with child. Wait until my son is born, and then you may become a hermit.”
To this he agreed. When she had given birth, he said:
“Now, wife, you are safely delivered, and I must turn hermit.”
“Wait,” said she, “until the child is weaned.”
But after that she conceived again.
“If I yield to her request,” thought the Bodhisatta, “I shall never escape at all. I will flee without telling her and become a hermit.”
So he said nothing, but rose in the night and fled away.
The city guards seized him. “I have a mother to support,” he said; and thus persuaded them to let him go free. After staying in a certain place, he passed out through the chief gate and made his way to the Himalayas, where he lived as a recluse. There he developed the Supernatural Faculties and the Attainments, and dwelt in the rapture of meditation. Exulting in his freedom, he declared:
“The bond of wife and child, the bond of passion—so hard to break—is broken!”
And he uttered these stanzas:
Not iron fetters—so the wise have told,
Nor ropes nor bars of wood can stronger hold
Than passion, and the love of child or wife,
Of gems and earrings wrought in finest gold.These heavy fetters—who shall ever find
Release from such? For these are bonds that bind.
Yet if the wise can break them, they are free,
Leaving all love and vain desire behind.
And having spoken thus, the Bodhisatta, without breaking the charm of his ecstasy, attained to the Brahma-world.
When the Master had ended this discourse, he declared the Truths. At the conclusion of the Truths, some attained the First Path, some the Second, some the Third, and some the Fourth. Then he identified the Birth, saying:
“Māhāmāyā was the mother; King Suddhodana was the father; Rāhula’s mother was the wife; Rāhula himself was the son; and I was the man who left his family and became an anchorite.”
Source : The Jataka ,Vol 4, by W.H.D. Rouse, 1901