Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 1

Author(s): Hemchandracharya, Helen M Johnson
Publisher: Oriental Research Institute Vadodra

Page 180

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and going like a jar on a water-wheel. Alas! alas ! for creatures whose minds are blinded by delusion this birth always passes in vain like the night for those asleep. Love, hate, and delusion cut down people's dharma at the root, even though it is shooting up, like rats a tree. Ah ! anger is made to grow by the foolish like a banyan-tree which will entirely consume even its own cultivator.207 Men mounted on conceit consider nothing, like elephant-drivers mounted on elephants crossing a boundary. Evil-hearted creatures do not abandon deceit which always causes trouble like the seed-vessel of the kapikacchū. Even a spotless collection of virtues is spoiled by greed alone, like milk by sour gruel, or a white cloth by collyrium. So long as the four passions close at hand watch like guards in the prison of worldly existence, whence will mokşa come to men ? Persons, engaged in the embraces of women, as if afflicted by bhūts, do not know themselves completely ruined. The intoxication of oneself by oneself is produced by various kinds of food for the sake of worthless things, like the cure of a lion by herbs. Saying, “This is fragrant; this is fragrant. Which shall I choose?” a greedy fool, wandering like a bee, never takes pleasure. People deceive themselves by material objects such as beautiful women, pleasant for the moment, alas! like a child by its playthings. Their ears given to the sounds of flutes, lutes, etc., they are torn away from their own good, like one who wishes to sleep from meditation on the śāstras. At the same time the consciousness of creatures, alas! alas! is bewildered by these sense-objects all together, as if by wind, bile, and phlegm that have become very strong."
While in this way the Supreme Lord's mind was woven with the threads of continuity of disgust with samsāra, then the Lokāntika-gods who have nine sub
207 1023. I have found no proverb about the destructiveness of the banyan tree, but it obviously occupies a large amount of ground with its spreading roots. There is a similar allusion in Vivekavilāsa 8. 106... ...prpapidām vatād gehe.