This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Cariyapitaka, the Pali canon's own verse collection that groups Jataka birth stories by which perfection each one illustrates, assigns exactly one story to adhitthana: the account of Prince Temiya, also called Mugapakkha, told as Temiyacariya in the collection's third division. Temiya resolved as a young child to feign being deaf, dumb and crippled rather than inherit his father's throne, and held that resolve unbroken through sixteen years of tests his family devised to provoke some response from him, breaking his silence only when he was at last judged an ill omen and ordered buried alive. Two Jataka stories more often mentioned in the same breath as adhitthana, a bodhisatta who gives away his own eyes and a bodhisatta who gives away his own children, are the Cariyapitaka's standard examples for dana, the perfection of generosity, and a bodhisatta shipwrecked at sea who keeps swimming toward shore is its standard example for viriya, the perfection of energy; none of the three is its adhitthana example. Commentarial tradition reads Temiya's story less as an instruction to imitate literally than as an illustration of a mental quality: the resolution, once rightly made, is held regardless of what it costs to keep it.
Acariya Dhammapala's Treatise on the Paramis, the ancient commentary on the Cariyapitaka, distinguishes adhitthana from ordinary stubbornness by tying it to the object of the resolution rather than to the intensity of the holding alone. Its characteristic, the treatise says, is determining upon the requisites of enlightenment, and its function is overcoming whatever opposes them; a vow held toward something unwholesome, however firmly, is not this perfection. The treatise also presents the ten paramis as interlocking rather than separate: truthfulness, it explains, is perfected by determination, since abstaining from falsehood only becomes complete in someone whose resolve does not waver. This qualification matters because a tradition that prizes firmness of vow needs some way to distinguish holy stubbornness from the ordinary kind, and the commentary locates that distinction in the goal held to rather than in the strength of the holding.
Later Theravada teaching treats adhitthana as one of the more approachable paramis for lay practice, since it requires no unusual circumstance to exercise, only the ordinary discipline of keeping a commitment, a meditation schedule, an ethical precept, a promise, once made, through the ordinary friction of changed mood or competing demand. In this reading the perfection is less about heroic vows under extraordinary pressure and more about the accumulated, unglamorous practice of finishing what one has resolved to start.