Jainthology

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

Page 53

for sometime and enjoy their grateful hospitality. The king also expressed his wish to give his daughter in marriage to Pārsva. The princess, Prabhavati, was also naturally enamoured of the hero who was, however, reluctant to accept the offer as he thought he was not made for a life of ease and luxury but to accomplish far more important and notable things.31
Once when out on a recreational trip into the nearby forests, Pārsva came across a number of ascetics who were practising various austerities with a view to torture their bodies. Their leader, intending to perform the pentaploid-fire austerity, was on the point of throwing a big log of wood into the fire when he was restrained by Parsva from doing so. The noble prince enlightened the ascetics of their ignorant ways and the uselessness of the body-torturing austerities they were practising, which might, moreover, involve bodily injury to other creatures. He, indeed, demonstrated to them the truth of his assertion by getting the log broken open which revealed a half-dead pair of snakes. The shocking incident turned the mind of Parsva himself from the world which he at once resolved to renounce. The appeals and pleadings of his mother, father, maternal uncle and other kinsmen and friends, even of the lovely princess Prabhavati, failed to deter him from the path of renunciation which he had chosen for the good of all living beings. 8 2
For several months this prince of ascetics devoted himself to perfect self-purification, roaming about as a homeless and possessionless recluse, always busy in spiritual contemplation and meditation. At last he arrived in the vicinity of what came to be known as the city of Ahicchatra. The actual spot where he stood in meditation was in the midst of very wild and dense forest. Here his forbearance was put to the severest test by the terrible tortures and persecutions inflicted on him by an Asura chief, Samvara. Somehow, Padmavati, a Yakşa princess, and her spouse, Dharaṇendra, the Naga king of the neighbourhood, got wise of these heinous doings of the Asura. They rushed to the rescue of Parsva whom they held in high veneration. They succeeded in warding of the Asura's further onslaughts and finally in annihilating him. Parsva was quite unaware of these happenings, since he had entirely detached himself from all bodily sensations and absorbed in the most sublime and transcendental spiritual concentration, which
31
32
Ibid., ch. xiii.
Ibid.
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