Jain Journal 1967 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 95

220
JAIN JOURNAL
peace and nirvana". Then was delivered his third sermon on the fire of craving, the torments of sickness, age and death that were no more than the fires of misery enkindled by sense-desires. He said how the flames might be extinguished by right living and the self itself in nirvāna. By this time he had gathered many more disciples round him.
The Tathagata now remembered the promise he had made to king Bimbisara, the ruler of Magadha, and so he went there with his many disciples. He was not only well-received, the king became a follower of the master and presented to him a charming park which became the first centre of the Buddhist faith. It was here that the Buddha took his two disciples, Sariputta and Mogallana, who were later to become the St. Paul and the St. Peter of the Buddhist Church. At the Jetavana park in Kosala that was jointly dedicated to the master by the king of Kosala and the merchant-prince Anathapindaka, the Tathagata delivered his sermon on nirvana. Invitations were pouring in from his own people, from Suddhodhana in particular, urging the master to visit Kapilavastu which he did with his twenty thousand followers. One is only to imagine the touching scene of the meeting between the two who were once a parent and a child and above all between the two who were once a man and a wife. The proud Yasodhara would not go herself to meet the master who seven years back had forsaken her one night in her bed. This was no pride born of haughtiness; this was a grievance genuine born of a very natural relation. The master perceived this and met her in her own chamber to see Yasodhara a very embodiment of monkhood. For ever since Siddhartha had left, she had renounced all earthly comforts and courted a life of rigorous austerity. Among the new recruits to the order here, the Tathagata claimed his own son Rahula who later became one of the wisest apostles of the Buddhist way.
The women too, headed by Yasodhara, wanted to join the order but the order had no place for them. Now the disciple Ananda interceded for them and the master had to reluctantly yield. The women now joined the order as nuns for whom more rigorous discipline was prescribed. But the order was now complete. For forty years thereafter the master fulfilled his earthly mission which, later, under royal patronage, was to cover the whole land and spread far beyond its border. In his last years he looked forward to the death of the body as a natural consequence of the mortal process; but he had lifted his spirit into the realm of nirvana. He was still fulfilling the mission in his eightieth year. When the rainy season came, he was severely ill. To Ananda he forecast his passing away three months hence. The master then reached Pava where