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EMANCIPATION OF AJITA SVĀMIN AND SAGARA
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powerful, and of proved ability. Returning without the princes, how can we, like men whose noses have been cut off, raise our faces in our master's presence? How can we tell the King such news about his sons which resembles an unexpected stroke of lightning ? Henceforth, alas ! it is not fitting for us to go there. However, death is a suitable refuge for all suffering ones. Of what use is life, like a miserable body, to a man who has destroyed the esteem felt by his lord ? Moreover, if the Cakravartin should die from hearing of the death of his sons, painful to bear, then, indeed, death would go in front of us.”
Meeting with a Brāhman (47–59) After taking such counsel together, while they all remained resolved on death, then a Brāhman came, wearing reddish garments. The head of a Brāhman village, he, lotus-hand raised, made them live, speaking to them in words equal to a life-giving herb:
“Gentlemen, why are you confused about what to do, your minds disordered, like hares that have fallen when a hunter has rushed on them? If your master's sixty thousand sons have died there simultaneously like twins, enough of grief. People born together, sometimes die separately; born separately, sometimes they die together. Many die, and few die, since death is the attendant of all living things. Death can not be warded off any one by any one even with a hundred efforts, like the inborn nature of people. If it can be warded off, why is it not warded off by Indras and emperors, etc., from themselves and their own people ?
A thunderbolt falling from the sky can be caught by the hand, the agitated ocean can be restrained by a dike, the raging fire at the end of the world can be extinguished, the wind that has arisen as a portent of the end of the world can be slowed down, a falling mountain can be propped up with a prop, but death can not be warded off by a hundred devices. Do not be grieved at the thought,
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