The Merchant of Seri

Also known as Serivanija Jataka

• 4 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Jataka Tales

Two traders worked the same road, both selling pots and pans and small ornaments, and they had an arrangement: when they came to a town, one would take the streets on one side of the river and the other would take the far side, and neither would go into the other's half.

Both of them were called Seri.

One was honest. The other was not.

The old woman's dish

The greedy one reached a certain street first and called out his wares, and an old woman in a poor house heard him.

She lived there with her granddaughter and they had nothing at all. But the girl wanted a trinket, and the old woman remembered something.

There was a dish on a high shelf that had belonged to the family long ago, black and dull and used for nothing. She fetched it down.

"We have no money," she said. "Would you take this for a bangle?"

The trader took the dish and scratched the underside of it with a needle, and the scratch came up yellow.

It was solid gold. Under the tarnish it was worth more than everything in his cart several times over.

And he thought: if I tell her that, I will have to pay for it.

So he threw it on the floor.

"This is worthless," he said. "It is not even worth the bangle. I would not take it as a gift."

And he walked out, meaning to come back in an hour and offer them almost nothing for it, and get it for that.

The second Seri

Not long after, the honest trader came down the same street.

The old woman heard him and sent the girl out.

"The last man said our dish was worthless," she said. "Will you look at it anyway?"

He took it and turned it over and he knew what it was within a few seconds.

And he told her.

"This is gold," he said. "It is worth a hundred thousand. I do not have a hundred thousand. I have five hundred coins and a cart of goods, and that is everything I own in the world, and it is not a fair price. But it is all I have. If you will take it, I will leave you the money and the cart and keep only the fare for the ferry."

The old woman looked at him.

"Take it," she said.

So he left her everything he had, put the dish under his arm, and went down to the river.

The ferry

The greedy trader came back to the house an hour later, as he had planned, with a small coin in his hand and a story ready about doing them a favour.

The old woman told him what had happened.

He ran. He went through the streets and down to the water shouting, and he came out onto the bank in time to see the ferry already out in the middle of the river with the honest trader standing in the stern.

He called across the water and offered him money, and then more money, and got no answer at all.

And he stood on the bank with his empty cart, having had a gold dish in his own two hands that morning and put it down on the floor.