Treasury of Jain Tales

Author(s): V M Kulkarni
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 89

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increase till the middle of life, then they wane. But in Sanatkumāra they saw something which really filled them with dismay and that is the brilliance of his beauty faded quickly like the friendship of a villain. Sanatkumāra felt astonished at the Brahmins' observation but when he looked at his own arms and chest he was surprised to see that both of them had lost the usual lustre. He felt miserable over the instability of the samsāra and bemoaned the vanity of the body. He pondered over the transience of beauty, youthful bloom and splendours in this worldly life and concluded:
"Therefore attachment to existence is not right. Ignorance is the infatuation with the body, foolishness the pride of beauty and youth, madness the enjoyment of the objects of pleasure. The things men possess in reality possess them like demons."
After realising this wisdom, he decided to give up all the worldly pleasures, the privileges of the universal sovereign or his fourteen jewels, even his queen Sunandā the Jewel of a Women' and his other beautiful wives, the great kings that served him and all the treasures. He gave them up, as if they were a straw clinging to him. After installing his son on his throne he left the town and entered his begging district to begin the life of a wandering mendicant. He fasted for several days and whenever he ate, the food was of poor quality the result of which was that he ended up in terrible illness like fever, cough, asthma, scabbies. But he bore all of them in proper spirit for seven hundred years. He performed frightful penances, painful penances, gruesome penances before he acquired miraculous powers such as the ability to cure by simple touch, to cure with his spittle, to cure with drops of spittle spurting from his mouth while speaking, to cure with his filth, even to cure
th anything. But inspite of this ability, he would not cure his own body.
Once again when Indra in heaven praised Sanatkumära and said that although he was harassed with diseases which he could easily cure himself yet he had been showing firmness of mind in not applying any remedy to them. Not believing this, the gods that had approached him in the past, again offered to put this statement