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SAMBHAVAJINACARITRA
227
People in both the country and towns became like ascetics, eating the bark of trees, bulbs, roots, and fruit, from lack of grain. They were not satisfied even when much food had been taken somehow, like people with morbid appetites. Ashamed of begging, the people generally began to wear a sham ascetic-garb in order to obtain alms.
Fathers, mothers, children abandoned each other and wandered here and there, as if they had lost the way, with the hope of eating. When food, etc., had been received in some way, a father did not give it to his son, though he saw him crying from starvation. A mother, wandering in the streets, sells her own wretched child for a handful of chick-peas, like an outcaste selling a winnowing-basket, etc. At dawn the destitute people, like hungry housedoves, picked up seeds that had fallen in the courts of the rich men's houses. Again and again in the shops of the bakers, etc., people stole food by trickery, like dogs. 374 Men considered it a blessing when they obtained just a trifle of food by some means or other at the end of the day, after they had wandered about all day. Even the highways of the city were worse than a cemetery from the wretched men who had fallen, who resembled skeletons, terriblelooking. People's ears were pierced by unceasing wails, that were like needles thrown into their ears, which poured forth at every step.
When the noble-minded king saw the fourfold congregation suffering in this famine which was like the end of the world, he thought : “I must protect the earth, all of it. But what am I to do? This evil season is not subject to weapons. Nevertheless, the whole congregation must be protected at all events, since the duty of the great is the assistance of worthy persons, first of all."
874 31. I believe there is an error here in the text. The MSS have labdhā° instead of labdhvā°, but the rest of the compound seems the same. It would be desirable for the comparison to have a word for an animal or something that dogs would tear apart after they had caught it. But I can make nothing of the kind out of the MSS.
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