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76. ARJUNA, THE GARDENER
Just outside the city of Rājagrha stood the temple of a Yaksa named Mudgarapāni. This was on the way to a garden where Arjuna worked as a gardener. Every day, his wife Skandasri carried his lunch from her house to the garden. She invariably passed the temple of the Yaksa and on her way back home she carried some flowers for the Yaksa. She also liked to rest there for a while. Generally she was known to be not a very chaste and honest woman. Once as she was sitting in the temple, six men came along merely for a chat. This woman drew their attention to herself and before long their flirtation began. The gardener was also a devotee of the Yaksa and he went to the temple regularly. On this day the woman had warned her six companions that they would leave her alone when her husband came. They misconstrued the remark and when the husband came, they overpowered him and tied him up to a pillar. Their amorous flirtations went on right in front of him. As if this was not enough, the woman made purring sounds like a cosy cat to tease her husband.
The gardener blamed the Yaksa who was not quite satisfied, he imagined, with his devotion. Otherwise, why should he suffer like this right under the nose of the Yaksa. He concluded that the image was not really a form of divinity but was only a block of wood. The Yaksa however took pity on him. He entered the body of the gardener who thus received enormous strength and with a heavy iron club, he despatched all those six men as well as his wife. Hereafter every day he killed in the temple six men and a woman. The people of Rājagrha considered it dangerous to get out of the town until Arjuna had completed his daily quota of six men and a
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