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CHAPTER SIX
In the meantime the vassal-kings, ministers, generals, and other people of the princes' retinues waiting in the vicinity, their faces covered with upper garments like people bashful from shame, their bodies colorless from grief like trees burned by fire, their minds exceedingly distraught like Kinnaras and Piśācas,840 their eyes tearful, miserable, like misers who have been robbed, their steps stumbling as if they had been bitten by snakes, entered the King's assembly simultaneously, as if they had a rendezvous (with the Brāhman's speech).
They bowed to the King and sat down in the proper places, and remained with down-cast faces as if wishing to enter the earth. After hearing the Brāhman's speech and seeing them in such a condition and returned without the princes like elephants without drivers, the King quickly became (as if) painted, sculptured, asleep, or transfixed by a charm, distraught, with twitching eyes. The Brāhman spoke to enlighten again the King who had swooned from lack of firmness and been restored to his natural state by firmness, “ You are of the family of Rşabha Svāmin, who was a sun for the sleep of delusion of all, and you are a brother of Lord Ajita, O King. Why do you disgrace them now, O King, yielding to your delusion like a lowborn person ?”
The King thought : “This Brāhman recited the prologue of the play of my sons' destruction in the guise of his son's death. Clearly he announces now the destruction of the princes. These ministers have come without the princes. How could their destruction come about, even in the mind, as they wandered over the earth at will, like lions in a forest ? Attended by the great jewels, 841 invincible from their own strength, by whom could they, having unstumbling powers, indeed, be killed ? ”
340 158. Both Kinnaras and Piśācas are sub-divisions of the Vyantaras. I do not know why they are used as examples of distraction.
341 169. I.e., the thirteen jewels; the woman-jewel was not with them.
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