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The gold beneath the grime

Eons ago, says a Jataka, there was a very rich merchant family in a proud and noble city somewhere in the Upper Gangetic Plain. The family lived in great splendour in their magnificent townhouse with its big, inner courtyard and its own temple. The house was surrounded by acres of garden with fragrant thickets of jasmine and golden champaka flowers and one end of the property rejoiced in several big cowsheds with at least 200 cows in them. The family gave generously to orphans and to homeless people, to the king’s hospice and to the charitable projects of temples. They supported poor students and indigent widows and contributed handsomely to the upkeep and running of rest houses for travellers and pilgrims. They often went to their pleasant country estate upriver, where they had swings and hammocks put up in the mango orchards. They picnicked on the riverbank and bathed in the river and had races and played ball, took out their boats, gossiped, napped, played long games of pachisi, had moonlit suppers, sang songs and told stories—all three generations together of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and faithful retainers.

However, the fortunes of this family became greatly reduced and not just that, all the men of the family died one by one. The servants went away to find other work and only an old grandmother and a little granddaughter were left. They escaped starvation by hiring themselves out as domestic workers and since they were too old and too young respectively to cook whole meals for others, the only things they could do, for which they were paid accordingly, were a bit of cleaning and light kitchen work, like peeling and cutting vegetables, washing and drying the whole spices, picking rice and lentils clean and helping to make pickles and papads. It was a big comedown for those who had been waited on all their lives and had never lacked for anything—but they were glad not to have to beg.

At this time, the Bodhisattva was a trader who sometimes worked in the city with another trader. This business partner was secretly less scrupulous than the Bodhisattva and naturally, the Bodhisattva did not know that. Their agreement was to divide the town into territories and enter each other’s areas only after the other one had left it. One day, the greedy trader came down the former fine family’s street, crying aloud his wares that included rare and costly trinkets like necklaces of foreign coins, coral strings from the Coromandel and chains of fine glass beads in colours as varied as the sea from across the Eastern Ocean.

Now nearly eight years old, the little granddaughter had been taught her manners since she was barely two. She missed her mother and father very much, having lost them both to a boat wreck on the river. But she managed not to complain about having to work so hard and at such dull, tiring tasks one after the other; nor did she complain about not having enough to eat or about wearing ugly hand-me-downs or about being spoken to crossly by the spoilt sons and daughters of the houses she worked in. Doing so would have embarrassed her grandmother and so she said nothing at all and never asked for anything, letting her small face crumple in tears only when there was nobody around to see.

But an instinct for fine things was in her blood and when she saw the trader’s lovely necklaces, she suddenly longed for an ornament, for something pretty all her own, and begged her grandmother to trade whatever she could. Touched to be asked to do something by the child, the grandmother went off to rummage in the storeroom at the back of their crumbling family home. She noticed a grimy old bowl lying in a corner with other old household bric-a-brac and offered that to the trader for a modest bead necklace.

One discreet scratch with a needle and the greedy trader knew that he held a bowl made of solid gold. Plotting instantly to get it for almost nothing, he threw it back saying that it was too worthless to trade and waited expectantly for the old lady to beg him to take it. But the old lady did no such thing, for such a move simply did not occur to her. Instead, she nodded quietly and withdrew abashed, little realizing that it was the old payasa, or milk pudding, bowl of the head of their family that had been put away after his death and had become unrecognizably dirty. She touched her granddaughter’s hair gently in apology and the little girl blinked hard and stoically spoke of something else.

When the Bodhisattva, the good trader, came by a couple of hours later after his wily business partner had left, the little girl did not dare accost him for fear of another snub. But since he swung a whole handful of necklaces at her in the jolliest way and smiled kindly, she asked him to wait and went in to ask her grandmother to try her luck again at trade. The old lady came out with the same old bowl, handed it to the trader and sent the little girl to shut the storeroom door so as to leave them alone for a minute. When the little girl ran in, the grandmother whispered to the trader that she knew her goods were worthless but pleaded with him to do the best he could, to give a very simple necklace or at least a bead bangle in exchange.

‘But who told you this bowl was worthless?’ asked the astonished trader, giving it a good rub and showing her the shine. Not only did he give them a fair deal for the golden bowl, but he also obligingly paid cash for other things of value discovered in the storeroom. He went away with a clear conscience, receiving many blessings from the grandmother and a beaming namaste from the granddaughter for the warm blanket suddenly obtained against cold fate.

The greedy trader collapsed and died of rage when he found out.

While the good trader was, of course, the Bodhisattva, the greedy trader who was not above trying to cheat widows and orphans was the Buddha’s wicked cousin Devdatt, and this was the beginning of Devdatt’s grudge against the Buddha through many rebirths thereafter, carrying mountains of baggage and never being at peace for a moment in all those lifetimes.