The Teacher, having thus discoursed on the subject that not then only, but formerly too, the Successor of the Buddhas had abandoned the world, proclaimed the Four Truths. Some entered the First Stage of the Path to Nirvāna, some the Second, some the Third. And when the Blessed One had thus told the double story, he established the connexion, and summed up the Jātaka as follows: “The barber of that time was Ānanda, the prince was Rāhula, but Makhā Deva the king was I myself.”
END OF THE STORY OF MAKHĀ DEVA.
No. 10.
SUKHAVIHĀRI JĀTAKA.
The Happy Life
“He whom others guard not,” etc.—This the Teacher told while at the Anūpiya Mango-grove, near the town of that name, about the Elder named Bhaddiya the Happy-minded. Bhaddiya the Happy-minded took the vows when the six young noblemen did so together with Upāli.[276] Of these, Bhaddiya and Kimbila and Bhagu and Upāli became Arahats, Ānanda entered the First Stage of the Road to Nirvāna, Anuruddha attained to the Knowledge of the Past and the Present and the Future, and Devadatta acquired the power of Deep Meditation. The story of the six young noblemen, up to the events at Anūpiya, will be related in the Khaṇḍahāla Jātaka.
Now one day the venerable Bhaddiya called to mind how full of anxiety he had been when, as a king, caring for himself like a guardian angel, and surrounding himself with every protection, he had lolled in his upper chamber on his royal couch: and now how free from anxiety he was, when, as an Arahat, he was wandering, here and there, in forests and waste places. And realizing this change, he uttered an exclamation of joy, “Oh, Happiness! Happiness!”
This the monks told the Blessed One, saying, “Bhaddiya is prophesying about Arahatship!”[277]
The Blessed One replied, “Mendicants! not now only is Bhaddiya full of joy; he was so also in a former birth.”
The monks requested the Blessed One to explain how that was. Then the Blessed One made manifest an event hidden through change of birth.