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JAINA STORIES
The king and the queen lost their their conciousness and fell on the ground The same god appeared there as a medicine man He applied air and water, and the king and the queen Tegained sense and sat up Said the quack,
"You people look to be very much lucky. Just see I have arrived here in time to help you. If you do one thing, I think, the prince may be restored to life.”
“What's that?" asked the royal couple in great curiosity. Said the quack to the king,
"You take this bow and arrow in your hand. Look ahead, and on the tree, you will see a bird of the colour of berry You shoot the arrow at the bird so that it drops down Then you apply its meat at the wound. It will be healed in a few minutes. I have --myself tried it in many cases, without failure even in one case."
The king declined Said he,
“Sır! This is a remedy beyond my capacity to use. I do not want to save my son by killing another's son. For me, life is life and I make no discrimination between the bird and the prince Killing a living being, howsoever small it may be, is a sin, and I am afraid, I cannot indulge in it."
The quack argued with the king and the queen and did his best to turn them to his way of thinking, but he failed. Now, the parents were thinking of performing the last rites of the dead prince, but they could not find sufficient wood in the forest, thanks to the stratagem of the god. So they had no other alternative but to discard the dead body in the forest and move ahead.
After the parents had left, the god came to the prince and restored him to life. The prince looked around, but his parents were not there. So he started crying. He was wandering where his parents had gone and why they had gone by leaving him alone in that dense forest He thought they would come back But for a long time there was no trace of them Now, he was really alarmed. So he got up and moved out in search of his parents,
The luck of the boy took a favourable turn and b-ought him to a city of which the king was Sumanasena As the
