One day, the venerable Mahamoggallana felt as if he had eaten too many beans. With his eye of wisdom, he saw an evil spirit enter his intestines. Then Mahamoggallana commanded: "Come out, evil spirit! Do not harm the Buddha and his disciples. By doing so, you will only bring yourself into prolonged suffering."

Hearing the command, the evil spirit was surprised and, emerging from Mahamoggallana's mouth, paused at the door, expecting to return when the seer was no longer vigilant. However, the clairvoyant continued to speak to him and instruct him.

"Know, evil spirit, that I too once existed in the guise of a harmful spirit. Then you were my nephew.

At that time, there lived the fully awakened Buddha Kakusandha, who had mastered his speech to perfection. He had two outstanding disciples: the incomparable Vidhura, renowned for his exposition of the Teaching, and Sanjiva, a master of contemplation who had mastered the life force.

I decided to penetrate into the minds of the venerable hermits, but I could not find a single loophole.

Then, in the village where Kakusandha was begging, I influenced the people's minds to vilify and criticize him and the Sangha. The villagers scolded the ascetics, saying that they considered passive sitting to be the attainment of the teaching.

"The same teaching," they said, "is possessed by an unburdened donkey, or a cat watching for a mouse. All this teaching is nothing more than thinking and rethinking empty thoughts."

However, the Awakened Kakusandha instructed his disciples, despite the negative attitude they received, to cultivate the Four Immeasurable Feelings: friendliness, compassion, the joy of associating with noble friends in the Sangha, and dispassion. Kakusandha's disciples cultivated these feelings, filling all directions with them, so that nothing in their minds remained unsaturated with the bliss and purity of these feelings. Therefore, I was unable to approach the ascetics. So I decided to master their minds in another way—

I influenced the minds of the villagers in such a way that they would praise Kakusandha and his disciples in every possible way, giving them great honors.

I hoped that attachment to praise would open the way to the minds of the ascetics, but the Blessed Kakusandha taught his disciples to contemplate the unattractiveness of the body, to cultivate disillusionment with the world, and to recognize the impermanence of pleasure. Thus, even with flattery, I was unable to create a loophole in the minds of the ascetics.

Feeling angry at my failures, I prompted one boy to throw a stone at Vidhura's head, causing him to bleed.

The blessed Kakusandha, turning to Vidhura, looked at him and said: “This evil spirit knows no bounds.”

Immediately I found myself in a place of terrible torment, a great hell. Hundreds of spears pierced me from every side, and once every many years their tips met in my heart—thus measured the duration of my suffering. I felt myself possessing a body like a human, but with the head of a fish; I was alive, but suffocating.

Sharing with the evil spirit the memory of my past error and the torment it caused, Mahamoggallana also showed him the greatness of the purity of mind that arises from understanding the Dhamma—the evil spirit saw palaces of precious stones at the bottom of the Great Ocean; he heard how the king of the gods, Sakka, and Brahma himself were rid of arrogance in the presence of a wise contemplative; he learned that Mahamoggallana was capable, by concentrating his mind, of attaining any of the worlds.

Two paths clearly appeared before the evil spirit: the path of harming others, which inevitably leads to the sense of "I" becoming a great hell; and the path of purifying the mind from attachment to name and form, which leads to the higher worlds. After this, the evil spirit disappeared at the very spot where it had heard Mahamoggallana's sermon.

May There Be Good!