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SANATKUMĀRACAKRICARITRA
169 companion of separation. For the fire of separation, knowing vulnerable points, is not joined with play. Why do you not grieve because of my grief ? For we always had one soul. Have you gone alone to some pleasurestream from curiosity ? Or did you ascend a pleasuremountain, or did you go to a pleasure-garden? How can you play without me? I am coming."
Talking in this way, the king wandered in various places, as if out of his senses. When three days had passed since he had eaten or drunk, the ministers feared for the king's life and showed him her body. When he had seen Visņusri's body, with its hair exceedingly disordered like a bear, with its eyes pecked out by wild herons, like a hare in the grass, 229 with its breasts chewed by vultures eager for flesh, all its intestines pulled out by jackals, having an unlovely appearance, covered with swarms of flies like sweet rice-water, filled with ants like a dish of eggs broken by a fall, smelling of putrefaction, Vikramayabas at once became disgusted with existence and reflected:
"Oh! there is nothing whatever of value in this worthless worldly existence. For how long a time have we been deluded by the idea of value in her, alas! No one who knows the highest good, indeed, is ensnared by women with qualities that are purely incidental like the color of turmeric. Women covered by skin are charming outside, filled with liver, excrement, impurities, phlegm, marrow, and bone, fastened together by muscles. If there could be a transposition of the outside and inside of a woman's body, its lover would conceal (within himself) a vulture and jackal. If Kāma wishes to conquer the world with women as a weapon, why does he, confused in mind, not take a weapon in the form of a small feather? I will root up completely the root of desire for that love by which, alas I everything is transformed."
220 31. Read śaśavaccasare with one MS. See App. I.
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