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NARRATIVE TALE IN JAIN LITERATURE
105
life, and after many love-sorrows, she finds him, by the aid of a picture which she paints of the couple of ducks. The man carries her off, on their flight they are captured by robbers, and they are to be sacrificed to the goddess Kāli. They are rescued, and the parents agree to the marriage. The wedding takes place. Soon afterwards they meet a monk who delivers a lecture to them on the religion of the Jina. Through the encounter with the monk, who in his previous life had been the hunter who killed the drake, they are so much affected that they renounce the world, and become monk and nun.
XX
THE MAN IN THE WELL The Parable "man in the well" is told in the
Samarāicca-kahā by Haribhadra :
Thus in the course of a sermon the parable of the "man in the well"20 is told. It is a very common occurrence in India ascetic poetry for a king to be forcibly remined, by some chance sight, of the vanity of existence, and to renounce the world. For instance, a king sees a snake devouring a frog, but itself devoured by a sea-eagle, which in its turn is devoured by a boa constrictor. This sight causes him to renounce the world and become an ascetic. King Yasodhara sees his first white hair.21 and resolves to become a monk. In the night he sees how his wife leaves the bedroom, approaches a hunchbacked watchman, who insults and misuses her, and how she gives herself up to this man.22 In order to prepare his mother gently for his plan to become a monk, he departs somewhat from the truth, and tells her of a dream in which he had become a monk. Now, with a view to averting the evil consequences
20. See above, Vol. I, p. 408. 21. Thus also in Jātaka No. 9, see above, p. 146. 22. Cf. Hertel, Jinakirtis "Geschichte von Pāla und Gopala", pp.
84 f., 92, where there is also reference to parallels from Indian and universal literature.
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