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[ The Chanda-Kaushika Gets A Blessed Life
self for meditation and penance. When he had stood there peacefully for some time meditating on the self, the snake came out and saw the Lord standing fearlessly before him. He began to burn with anger and said to himself, Oh, the courage of this man to stand firmly and fearlessly here in my solitary and calm territory of the forest where even the birds beasts of prey fear to enter. He is standing close to me, just within my reach. It seems he has been suffering from some greatest calamity on account of which he wants to throw himself into my mouth; surely, he is waiting for his death. “It is undoubtedly true that a man, who is suffering from joundice, sees the refelction of the yellowishness of his own disease in every object of whatever colour; and the man who becomes blind in the month of Shravana ( the English month July ), when there is greenness everywhere in Nature, sees greenness in every object even in the hottest summer when everything is dry and bare. The reader must have understood the reason of this deception. The snake himself was suffering from wordly miseries but he thought that the Lord, who was quite unattached to worldly joys and sorrows was suffering from them. This is the difference between the light of knowledge and the darkness of ignorance.
Now the snake proceeded towards the Lord and, having reached near him, gave out a loud hiss on his body. His very hiss was so poisonous that a kind of blue light spread all round and something like a spark of fire began to shine in the air. The birds which were sitting on the stumps of trees and bushes ( which had been already burnt by his poison) fell down on the ground, and the wild beasts that were running by met the same fate. But the Lord stood quite unaffected by that poison. The snake then felt very angry;
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