Devadatta: The Buddha's Rival and Cousin

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Devadatta was a cousin of the Buddha and an ordained monk who became his most dangerous rival. The early monastic texts say he asked to take over leadership of the Saṅgha, was refused, tried three times to have the Buddha killed, and then split the community by demanding five stricter rules — provoking what tradition remembers as Buddhism’s first schism. He is the great cautionary figure of the canon.

Who Devadatta Was

Devadatta belonged to the Sakyan clan, the Buddha’s own people, and is almost always remembered as the Buddha’s cousin. The exact family line, though, is one of the places where the sources quietly disagree — and an honest account should say so.

One Pāli tradition (recorded in the Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names) makes him the son of Suppabuddha and brother of Bhaddakaccānā — that is, of Yasodharā, the Buddha’s wife — which would make Devadatta the Buddha’s brother-in-law as well as cousin. A different strand, preserved in the Tibetan Dulva and the Mahāvastu, names his father as Amitodana and makes him the brother of Ānanda, the Buddha’s beloved attendant. The texts cannot be reconciled on this detail, so the safest statement is the one they all share: he was a close Sakyan kinsman of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who became the Buddha.

What the accounts agree on is that he entered the order early. When the Buddha returned to Kapilavatthu after his awakening and taught his kinsmen, a group of Sakyan princes went forth as monks — Bhaddiya, Anuruddha, Ānanda, Bhagu, Kimbila — together with the court barber Upāli, and Devadatta among them. For years he was, by all accounts, a capable and respected monk; some texts credit him with real meditative attainment. The story is not one of an obvious villain, but of a gifted disciple who went wrong.

The Request to Lead the Saṅgha

The turning point, in the canonical telling, is ambition. As the Buddha grew older, Devadatta saw an opening. He had cultivated the friendship of Prince Ajātasattu of Magadha — the heir of King Bimbisāra, one of the Buddha’s chief royal patrons — and with that powerful backing he made his move.

At a gathering of monks, Devadatta proposed that the Buddha, now advanced in years, should retire and hand leadership of the community over to him. The Cullavagga records the Buddha’s blunt refusal: he would not entrust the order even to his most senior disciples, Sāriputta and Moggallāna, let alone to Devadatta — whom he dismissed as one “to be vomited like spittle.” It was a public humiliation, and it hardened Devadatta’s resolve. From this point the texts describe him not as a reformer with a grievance but as a man bent on supplanting the Buddha by any means.

The Three Attempts on the Buddha’s Life

The Vinaya account that follows is dramatic, and parts of it carry the unmistakable colour of devotional legend. The texts describe three attempts to have the Buddha killed.

First, Devadatta — with Ajātasattu’s help — dispatched royal archers to ambush the Buddha on the road. According to the story, each assassin, on meeting the Buddha, was instead converted and could not raise a hand against him.

Second, Devadatta tried to do the deed himself. As the Buddha walked on the slopes of Gijjhakūṭa (Vulture Peak) near Rājagaha, Devadatta hurled down a great rock to crush him. The boulder was deflected, but a splinter struck the Buddha’s foot and drew blood. This wounding is corroborated within the canon itself: the short Sakalika Sutta (SN 1.38) describes the Buddha pierced in the foot by a stone sliver, in severe pain, bearing it mindfully. Tradition adds that the famed physician Jīvaka was summoned to treat the wound — and that to cause a buddha’s blood to flow is counted among the gravest of all deeds.

Third, and most famous, Devadatta arranged for a fierce elephant named Nāḷāgiri (called Dhanapāla in some texts) to be made drunk on toddy and loosed on the Buddha during his alms-round through the streets. As the maddened animal charged, the Buddha is said to have suffused it with loving-kindness (mettā), and the elephant grew calm, lowered its trunk, and bowed before him. The episode became one of the most beloved scenes in Buddhist art, carved on stūpas and painted across Asia as the Buddha’s gentleness conquers brute violence. (It belongs to a recurring theme in his life of facing down hostile forces — compare the assault by Māra, the tempter, on the night of awakening, where the weapon is temptation rather than an elephant.)

The same chain of events spilled into Magadha’s politics. By Britannica’s summary, Devadatta is said to have urged Ajātasattu to seize the throne by killing his own father, King Bimbisāra — so that the prince’s coup and Devadatta’s bid for the Saṅgha advanced together.

The Five Points and the First Schism

When violence failed, Devadatta changed tactics — and this is where his story matters most for Buddhist history. He proposed that the Buddha make five ascetic rules compulsory for every monk:

1. that monks should dwell only in the forest, never in a village;
2. that they should live only on alms they begged, refusing invitations to meals;
3. that they should wear only rag-robes, refusing cloth offered by lay donors;
4. that they should dwell only at the foot of a tree, never under a roof;
5. that they should never eat fish or meat.

The cleverage here is subtle. None of these were alien to the tradition — each was already an optional austere practice (the later dhutaṅga observances). What the Buddha refused was to make them mandatory. He answered, in effect, that a monk who wished to keep them was free to do so, but they would not be forced on all. Devadatta had calculated exactly this: he could now stand before the community as the stricter, purer teacher and paint the Buddha as lax and indulgent.

It worked, at least briefly. Devadatta won over five hundred newly ordained monks from Vesāli and led them away to Gayāsīsa, establishing a separate community with its own recitation of the monastic code. This deliberate division of the Saṅgha is what the tradition calls the first schism — and “schism” (saṅghabheda) is treated as one of the most serious offences a monk can commit, precisely because of episodes like this.

The schism did not hold. The Buddha sent his two chief disciples, Sāriputta and Moggallāna, to Gayāsīsa. While Devadatta slept, they taught the five hundred and won them back, leading them home to the Buddha. Devadatta’s movement, in the canonical account, collapsed almost as soon as it began.

How the Story Ends

Tradition gives Devadatta a grim and famous death. By later accounts he fell seriously ill and, near the end, repented — setting out on a litter to seek the Buddha’s forgiveness. He never arrived: at the gate of the Jetavana monastery the earth opened and swallowed him, plunging him into Avīci, the deepest hell, for the weight of his deeds.

Yet the tradition does not leave him there forever, and this is one of its more striking notes of mercy. The Theravāda holds that after his immense span of suffering, Devadatta will eventually be reborn and become a solitary (pacceka) buddha named Aṭṭhissara. The Mahāyāna goes further still: in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha declares that Devadatta — in some past life his own teacher — will in the far future attain full Buddhahood as a buddha called Devarāja. Even the arch-villain, the texts insist, is not beyond awakening.

How History Sees Devadatta

It is worth being honest about what kind of source these stories are. The Devadatta of the canon is a literary and moral figure as much as a historical one — the embodiment of ambition, divisiveness, and the corruption of a spiritual gift. The miraculous deflected boulder, the converted assassins, the kneeling elephant, the opening earth: these read as devotional narrative, not court record.

Some modern scholars suspect the portrait is also partly polemical. As the scholar Donald S. Lopez Jr. notes (writing in Tricycle), Devadatta’s followers seem to have survived as a real ascetic movement for many centuries. The Chinese pilgrims Faxian (5th century) and Xuanzang (7th century) both reported encountering communities that still honoured Devadatta’s stricter rules, and Yijing (late 7th century) found his adherents across India. That a separate Devadatta lineage persisted so long suggests his “five points” were a serious, attractive vision of monastic rigour — and that the canonical demonisation may reflect a settled, town-based monasticism’s distaste for a more austere rival, as much as the historical facts. Tellingly, the great commentator Buddhaghosa later listed thirteen ascetic practices approvingly — most of them close to what Devadatta is condemned for demanding.

None of this rehabilitates the assassin of the stories. But it is a reminder that early Buddhism was a living, sometimes contentious movement, and that even its villains shaped how it spread and organised itself. Whatever the man behind the legend was truly like, Devadatta endures in the tradition as its great warning: that nearness to the teaching is no guarantee of wisdom, and that pride can turn even a brilliant disciple against the very path he claimed to serve.

To meet the figures on the other side of these events, see the Buddha’s great disciples; for the whole arc of his life, who was the Buddha?