A Wound from a Past Life and the Trap of Love

The story of a young monk who grows infatuated with a female benefactor, leading to the Buddha's explanation of karma and conditions (dependent origination) from a past life, when an archer was betrayed by his wife who fell under the spell of a bandit.

In the early morning in the city of Rajagaha, dew still rested on the grass along the road. A young monk, his robes and alms bowl in perfect order, walked gently along, yet his heart had begun to stir with unrest. He no longer wandered from house to house on his alms round as he once did. Instead, his feet kept drawing him, as if on their own, toward one particular house at the end of the street.

It was the home of a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a wealthy family. It had all begun a few weeks earlier, when she made offerings to him. After the meal, she spoke in a sweet voice, full of care: "Venerable sir, please do not wander far anymore. Just come straight from the monastery to our home. Whatever you need, I will offer it all to you."

The invitation sounded so convenient. The young monk thought to himself: "Going from house to house is tiring; it would be better to keep to one place." And so he accepted. At first, he simply received the offerings and left. But little by little, the empty hours after the meal grew plentiful. No longer walking for hours under the harsh sun, he had more time to sit and converse. Casual small talk turned into deep conversation, and then into a silence full of obsession.

One afternoon, as the fading golden sunlight slanted through the window frame, the monk sat lost in a daze. His eyes stared into empty space, and though his ears heard the birds singing, his heart felt no joy. His fellow monks noticed the change. One senior brother came close, placed a hand on his shoulder, and asked softly: "Brother, why do you look so weary and absent-minded these days? Are you facing some difficulty in your practice?"

The young monk started, his trembling hands clutching the hem of his kasaya robe. He bowed his head and confessed in a faint voice: "Venerable brother... I do not know what is wrong with me. Every time I return to the meditation monastery, the image of that benefactor appears vividly before me. I miss her, and I miss those sweet words. My mind is in complete turmoil."

The worry spread quickly. The monks immediately informed the young monk's preceptor, who brought his disciple to see the Buddha. Before the Enlightened One, the young monk knelt down, tears streaming down his face, begging for a remedy to heal the sickness of longing that was eroding his resolve in the monastic life.

The Buddha looked at him with eyes of compassion that saw through everything. Then he slowly told a story from countless lifetimes ago: "Monk, the girl you are so attached to was once your wife in a past life. But she was not a faithful wife."

In that life, the young monk was a master archer, famous throughout the kingdom. He had married a beautiful woman — the very girl of the present day. One day, the king sent him to destroy a dangerous band of robbers hiding in a rocky cave. The battle was fierce. When all the bandits had been struck down, only their fiercest leader remained. The archer had used up his arrows and was forced to rely on close combat to capture him alive.

In the struggle, he called out loudly to his wife standing behind him: "My dear! Bring me more arrows, quickly!" The wife ran to fetch them. In that brief moment of waiting, the bandit leader seized the opening and lunged forward to attack. The two men fought fiercely. In the end, the archer managed to lock the robber's arms and bind him. Just then, the wife returned, a sword in her hand.

The archer stretched out his arms and called: "Give me the sword! Let me finish him off." But then something horrifying happened. As the wife drew near, her eyes fell upon the robber's face. He had a thick, wild beard, eyes that were fierce yet deeply sorrowful, and a rugged frame radiating a wild, reckless masculinity. Compared with her husband — a proper, refined man, yet somehow "safe" and dull — her heart suddenly trembled with overwhelming force. It was the sudden feeling of a crush, a blind and instinctive attraction.

Instead of handing the sword to her husband, she held it out toward the robber. He snatched it and drove it through the archer's chest. The archer fell, dying in utter bewilderment. The robber then dragged her away, but when they reached the riverbank, he pressed a knife to her throat, stripped her of her gold bracelets and necklaces, and abandoned her there. She lost everything, filled with regret — but it was far too late.

The Buddha concluded: "The feeling of attachment you are experiencing now is not true love. It is the repetition of an old wound. Before you even had a chance to understand, you were betrayed. That bolt of lightning is only an illusion driven by karmic force, making you mistake a passing emotion for lasting happiness."

The Meaning of the Story

The story illustrates that romantic love within samsara (cycle of rebirth) is often fragile, and easily confused with old karmic conditions (dependent origination). Feelings of infatuation that arise suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, are usually not based on deep understanding or on virtue. They are the recurrence of instinctive desires, or of lessons left unfinished from a past life.

The Buddha taught that until we attain the fruit of arahantship, we should not place absolute trust in our own emotions, for the ordinary heart and mind are easily deceived by the illusions of sensual pleasure and by addiction to emotional highs. Love based on appearance and fleeting feeling rests on a weak foundation; it easily collapses and causes suffering (dukkha).

Compiled from a dharma talk by the Venerable Thích Chân Quang.