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FUNDAMENTAL TRUTHS
157
ber is that there is no shelter for him (Asarana bhāvanā). In this world of misery, disease, old age and death, neither wife, friends, nor guru can afford us protection; only by the practice of dharma can we escape from the cycle of rebirth. To illustrate the truth of this reflection the following story is told. There once lived in India the son of a wealthy landowner, who was so handsome that his father, his mother and his wife all adored him. Suddenly the young man was stricken with an excruciating disease of the eyes, and though his parents and his wife strove to lighten the pain, they werc powerless. Gradually the youth realized that, as no one could shelter him from disease, so no one could be his refuge from death, and the reflection induced him to promise to withdraw from the world, if religion could cure him. His cyes were immediately healed, and he went as an ascetic to live in a distant forest. The king of that country happened to pass, and was astounded to find so goodly a youth living the life of a monk, and thought he must have withdrawn from the world in consequence of some injustice or oppression. He therefore offered to take up his cause, remedy any wrong that had been done to him, and protect and shelter him against future injustice. But the ascetic showed the king how impossible it was to find any shelter in this world from oppression or from disease and death, and how the only true refuge was to be found in voluntarily forsaking all that one had, and following a law whose goal was death; on one who had taken up such a life no injury could be inflicted. The king, listening to this moving discourse, realized that in this world he could not even protect his own royal self, and so he too became an ascetic, and by so doing stopped up all the channels through which he could be wounded or through which karma could flow.
By never forgetting that the cycle of rebirth is end. less, and that one may be reborn as a bird, or beast, or
1 Other Jaina deny that the king became an ascetic, and say he was merely convinced of the truth of this bhāvanā.
