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grand children and indeed the whole host of his relatives. They all ate heartily but when the night came and as the food was being digested an extraordinary torrent of madness rushed upon them. They indulged in wild orgies of sexuality forgetting all sanctity of relations so that they had union with mother, daughter-in-law, sister etc. When however the morning came, they felt so terribly ashamed of each other that they all left the town and went away. The Brahmin kept on wondering why the king should have subjected him to such cruel mockery when after all he was not his enemy. One of these days, when he was still wandering around in the woods in his desperate mood he saw a goatherd who was hitting the leaves of fig tree with small stones and making holes in them. The Brahmin felt that the goatherd would rightly serve his purpose. He offered him sumptuous temptations and explained to him what his purpose was and the goatherd agreed to serve it.
Accordingly when the goatherd saw Brahmadatta in the wood, he hid himself behind a wall and being an unerring shot he tore out both the eyes of the king. The king investigated and fixed the blame on the Brahmin whom he arrested along with his sons and relatives. He killed all of them and ordered that their eyes should be plucked out of their sockets and brought to him in a dish so that he would experience the wild pleasure of crushing them with his own hand. The king's officer was sad to realise that the king was in the grip of evil forces that were only working out the karman on the king. He therefore put the sākhotaka fruits into the dish and brought them to the king who spent many days in crushing them and deriving wild pleasure. When his time came and the king died he was born as a hell being in the seventh hell where he was condemned to live for thirtythree sāgaropamas.
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