The Monkey King

Also known as Mahakapi Jataka

• 4 minute read
• Ages 7-11
• Jataka Tales

On the bank of the Ganges grew a mango tree so large that it stood above the whole forest, and its fruit was sweeter than any fruit in the country.

Eighty thousand monkeys lived in it, and their king was the largest of them, a monkey the size of a young deer and far older than any of the others.

He had given them one rule. The branch that hung out over the river was to be stripped of every mango before it ripened, and nothing was to be allowed to fall in the water.

One mango

They obeyed him for years. But a tree that size has more fruit than eighty thousand monkeys can count, and one mango on the river branch was hidden behind an ants' nest and nobody saw it.

It ripened. It fell. It went downstream.

And it came to rest against the bathing steps of the King of Benares, who was in the river at the time.

He had never tasted anything like it. He asked his foresters where such a fruit grew, and they told him, and the next morning he went up the river with a company of archers to find the tree.

They found it at dusk, and they found the monkeys in it.

The bridge

The King gave orders to surround the tree and shoot at first light.

The monkeys woke in the dark to find archers standing in a ring below them with arrows already fitted. There was no branch that reached the far bank. There was nowhere to go.

Their king looked at the gap for a long time.

Then he went up to the highest point of the tree, out along the longest branch on the river side, and jumped.

It was further than any monkey had ever jumped. He landed in a bamboo thicket on the opposite bank, took hold of a long stem, tore it out by the root, and tied one end round his own ankles.

Then he jumped back.

He was one bamboo length short. The stem had been long enough to reach the tree but not long enough to reach it and be tied there as well, and there was nothing to make up the difference except himself.

So he caught the branch with his hands, and stretched out across the gap, and held on, and told them to cross.

Eighty thousand

They went over him.

Eighty thousand monkeys, one after another, all night, running the length of his back and his arms and out along the bamboo to the far bank. He held the branch and did not let go and did not say anything.

The last to cross was a young monkey who had always resented him, and who went over harder than he needed to, and something in the old monkey's back gave way.

But the tree was empty by dawn.

The King of Benares

The King had watched the whole of it from below, and he had not given the order to shoot.

When it was over he had his men cut the monkey down gently and lay him on a cloth, and he sat beside him himself and washed his face with river water.

"They went over your body," he said. "You made yourself a bridge. Did you not know they would kill you?"

"I knew," said the monkey.

"Then why?"

"I was their king," said the monkey. "That is what the word means. It does not mean they carry me."

And the King of Benares thought about that for a long time after, and it changed the way he ruled for the rest of his life.