Jinamanjari 2001 09 No 24

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 56

Siva, the god of destruction, by drinking their own blood. In one corner some fanatics were selling for a price picces of flesh cut off froin their own bodies. And at another place certain fanatics were worshipping the Goddess by swinging from their intestines, extracted with their own hands. Elsewhere certain grim men were offering their own flesh as an oblation in the sacred firc. Such was the temple of Chāndamundi.
Meanwhile, the Jaina sage Sudatta, famous for his austerities and unaffected by the rigors of winter and the summer and the monsoon, was approaching Rajapura with a large number of disciples. Avoiding the city in view of the impending slaughter, and turning to the east, he saw a beautiful pleasure garden where young men were disporting themselves with beautiful damsels, adorned with floral ornaments. But Sudatta said to himself thus:
Such places, like the hours of moonrisc, occasion gossip about the amours of the beautiful women of all the world. Like the spring, they provide free scope for mundane joys in which the sentiment of love prevails. Such places, as a rule, delude in a moment the heart even of one whose mind is purified by deep concentration. So it is not meant for an ascetic to remain here.
Going a few steps further, the sage saw a cremation ground with the funeral pyres tiercely burning; and the gruesome scene of desolation awakened diverse thoughts in his mind. He moved further away, and came to a hill not far from Rajapura. Here he fixed his camp and ordered the monks to beg for alms in the neighboring villages.
Among the disciples of Sudatta were two young ascetics, a boy and a girl, brother and sister, named Abhayaruci and Abhayamati respectively, who, unlike the others, were directed to beg in the city. They were the twin children of Kusumavati, sister of Māradatta, and chief queen of Yaşomati, son of Yaşodhara Mahārāja, who had taken the monastic vow in carly childhood and wandered with the sage Sudatta. On their way to the city the two were encountered by the guards who had been sent in quest of a couple of human victims for
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