Stories of the Villainess, Māgandiyā

The Fifth Story in the Udenavatthu and Similar Stories

Abstract

Māgandiyāvatthu is the fifth story in the Udenavatthu, which is contained in the Dhammapadāṭṭhakathā (the Commentary on the Dhammapada). This story tells of an “incident” before Māgandiyā, the beautiful daughter of a Brahman named Māgandiya, was married to King Udena. The story has two gāthās (verses), one of which is told by the Buddha, and shows his aversion to women, in his saying that all women’s bodies are filled with excretions. Hearing this verse, Māgandiyā came to have a strong hatred for the Buddha.
By analyzing these two gāthās, I clarified the following:
(1) The role of the fifth story in the Udenavatthu
Neither gāthā is contained in the Dhammapa, although the Udenavatthu is a part of the Commentary on it. Why does the fifth story in the Udenavatthu contain such “irrelevant” gāthās? The key to this problem is one of the two gāthās, which was told by the Buddha. Through comparison with some other Pāli texts such as the Suttanipāta and so forth, I identified this as the 835th verse in the Suttanipāta. Thence, it can be said that the fifth story in the Udenavatthu was originally a commentary on this verse.
This story was probably taken from another text—although it is not yet clear which—as an introduction to the sixth story, which tells of the tragic death of Sāmāvatī, a follower of the Buddha, who was killed by Māgandiyā due to her strong hatred for him.
(2) Similar stories in Northern Buddhist texts
Among the Northern Buddhist texts, written in old Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mongolian, there are variants of this story. Regarding the two gāthās, the descriptions in each text differ slightly. For example, among the old Chinese texts, such as the Yi Zu Jing (義足経), the Liu Du Ji Jing (六度 集経), and the You Tian Wang Jing (優填王経), there are partially common descriptions. This shows a likely “reuse of texts” when they were translated. The texts of Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya, which have been translated into several languages, also show different translations in each language text.
Furthermore, these similar stories are not necessarily commentaries, because some old Chinese texts report severe comment of the Buddha in prose style, instead of in verse. In Northern Buddhism, Māgandiyā’s story seems to have spread as a simple episode about a young woman who was rejected by the Buddha and became a villainess.