Treasury of Jain Tales

SR No.: 006762
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: V M Kulkarni
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre
Publication Year: 1994
Total Pages: 468
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 17 MB

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left the house. All his wives felt tremendously pleased to be so left alone. They decided to make a day of it. They first went in for a luxurious bath. They dressed themselves up in their finest clothes. They put on all their jewellery and spent a good deal of their time admiring themselves in their mirrors. In the meantime, the husband came back home at an unexpectedly early hour. He felt terribly angry to see all his women in this extravagant mood. He tried to chase them and finally caught hold of one of them and hammered her so much that the poor woman died. The other women felt terribly frightened that he would then go after them and finish them one by one. But they gave him no chance. Before he could think of his next move, they hurled the mirrors in which they were admiring themselves at him and quickly enough the poor man was buried under a heap of the splinters of broken mirrors. Indeed the poor man himself became a piece of glass. But they quickly relented and felt shocked at what they had done. They were greatly frightened that every one around would look upon them as murderers of their husband. They felt worried about their own future. The fear of public ire drove them crazy and they went about shutting every door and window of the house and finally they set the whole of it ablaze, reducing their unfortunate husband and themselves to ashes.
in their next life, they were all re-born as human beings; they retained human life because of the sincerity of their contrite feelings and a certain trace of compassion which they could not lose in all the whirlwind of their wrath. Their karma however decided that as human beings they should all become thieves, condemned to live in a mountainous terrain. The goldsmith was re-born as a lower animal and the woman he had killed first was also sent into life as an animal of lower category and later as human being but as a male child in a Brahmin family. The goldsmith, on completing his life as a lower animal was re-born as a daughter in the same Brahmin family where one of his wives was working now for five years as a male slave. This newly born girl was always given to weeping and crying and the slave boy was asked to look after her. He discovered that the child felt soothed and stopped crying whenever he ran his hand on her stomach and abdomen and gradually brought it on her genitals. The parents of the child once noticed this and gave the boy a sound thrashing and drove him out of their house. The giri also left the house when she was grown enough and her parents could not know where she had disappeared.