Life and Stories of Jaina Savior Parcvanatha

Author(s): Maurice Bloomfield
Publisher: Maurice Bloomfield

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Life and Stories of Pārçvanātha
others also to abstain, he obtained the highest success in the two worlds (355-438).
Story of mother and son punished for cursing one
another by implication 21 The narrative here passes from ahinsā (injury by deed) to the demonstration that injury by words also is reprehensible: In Vardhanāgapura lived a man of good family, Sadvada, with his wife Candrā, and a son Sarga. Sadvada died poor. Candrā subsisted by doing chores in other people's houses, while Sarga gathered wood in the forest. One day, when Sarga was away at the forest, Candrā was called to carry water to a merchant's house. Before leaving she fondly hung up an excellent meal for her son in a hammock, and went to the merchant's house. In the evening Sarga returned, threw down his wood, but, not seeing his mother, hungry and thirsty, as he was, waxed exceeding wroth.' When the mother finally arrived, worn out from her day's work, Sarga said to her roughly: 'How long, wretched woman, will you stand there, impaled on a stake?'. Thereupon she retorted petulantly:' Are your hands cut off, that you can't take your supper out of the hammock and eat it?' In due time both became Jain ascetics, died, and went to the heaven of the gods (451). Falling from that state, the soul of Sarga was reborn as Aruņadeva, the son of Kumāradeva, a merchant of Tāmaliptī; the soul of Candrā, as Deviņi,22 the daughter of a rich merchant Jasāditya
* The same story, with less obvious application, in Samarādityasamksepa 7. 492 ff. Cf., remotely, Paricistaparvan 2. 316 ff.; and Hertel, Das Pañcatantra, p. 108, note 4.
* In the sequel also Devini. Samarādityagainksepa has the Prākrit form, Derni, taken over from the Samaräiccakahā.