The Tale of Monkey Brothers

This is yet another of the Jataka tales I read on Internet today. The tale goes like this. The Buddha, in one of his earlier birth, was a monkey. Along with his brother, he ruled a band of eighty four thousand monkeys. The two brothers also had a blind mother. Once, the brothers set out in search of food and went far away. However, they sent food to their blind mother through other monkeys. They believed that the mokeys would take care of their mother but to their disappointment, they found their mother in an extremely neglected condition on their return. Saddened by the apathy of their fellow monkies,the two brother went to live in a seclusion along with their mother.

One day, a brahmin spotted the mother monkey and tried to kill her. The two brothers requested him to take their lives and let their mother go. The brahmin killed the two brothers, but even after that he was not satisfied and he killed the mother monkey too. The brahmin was overjoyed to have killed three monkeys in a day and was sure that his family would be proud of his possessions.

On reaching home, he was devasted to find that his entire family had been wiped out when a lightning struck the house. The brahmin went mad at the loss of his family.

The moral of the story is when you are cruel to others, fate treats you with equal cruelty.