Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

Author(s): C H Tawney
Publisher: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation New Delhi

Page 46

the palace by force. The facts were communicated to Yugabáhu's son Chandrayaças, and he, exclaiming, ' Alas, alas !' came to the garden with surgeons, and had his father's wound bound up and all other necessary things
done.
In a moment his voice stopped ; his two eyes closed; His body became motionless, and white from loss of blood; Madanarekhá, perceiving that her husband was at death's door, Going close to his ear, spake thus in a soft voice.
So Madanarekhá, summoning up all her self-control, brought about her husband's deathbed reconciliation* with all by uttering the following words : 'Noble sir, now attend carefully. This is a time for self-possession, do not indulge vain regrets; the operation of action is mighty; whatever acts a man long ago performed, to him those acts return; an enemy is merely the instrumental cause. Take with you the viaticum of virtue; condemn all wicked deeds; beg forgiveness of friends and enemies, relations and strangers; beg forgiveness of those animals that you afflicted in your animal births, those inhabitants of hell that you afflicted when in hell, and similarly of those gods that you gave pain to when a god, and of those men that you injured in your human births.
Life, youth, fortune, beauty, association with dear ones, Might, all these things are like a wave of the sea made to dance by
the wind. For living beings here, devoured by disease, birth, old age, and
death, Save the law revealed by the Jina, there is no other shelter. Alien is the slaughter of enemies, alien corn, wealth, and so on, Alien are relations to the soul; in vain is the fool bewildered. What wise man would swoon with anxiety about the body, the home
of impurities, Filled up, as it is, with grease, blood, flesh, bone, liver, fæces, and
urine ?
* Have recourse to the arhats and other holy ones for refuge ; remember the formula of adoration ; avoid the
* I have translated áradhaná by 'reconciliation with all.' Jacobi gives content' as the equivalent of áráhaná (Kalpa Sútra,' 114). Weber, in his . Fragment der Bhagavati,' seems to take it as 'attain. ment of the great object of life.'