Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 2

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

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different places, like travelers who have slept in one place at night departing at dawn. Who, pray, is a relative and who an enemy of people coming and going in this world like buckets on a water-wheel? Therefore, the household must be abandoned. It must be abandoned first, and one must strive only for the soul's welfare. For destruction of the soul's welfare is folly. Spiritual welfare, characterized by emancipation, shining with the mula- and uttaragunas 18 like the sun's rays, gives pure, endless happiness."
CHAPTER ONE
Visit to Suri Arindama (67-142)
As the King was reflecting thus, Sri Arindama Suri, like a wishing-gem itself, came to the garden. When the King heard the news of his arrival, he felt as joyful as if he had drunk a draught of nectar. Joyfully, the King set out to pay homage to him, covering the sky with clouds, as it were, by umbrellas of peacock-feathers. Touched by two chauris, which were like sidelong glances falling from the goddess Laksmi, on both sides; blockading all the heavens with golden-armored horses, like birds with golden wings, swift, their snorting suppressed; bending the surface of the earth with the weight of large elephants which were like living peaks of the Añjana Mountains; 17 himself surrounded on all sides with devotion by his vassals who resembled possessors of mind-reading knowledge because of their knowledge of their master's mind; his arrival announced from afar by the sounds of auspicious drums pouring forth in the sky as if in rivalry with the uproar of the bards; attended on all sides by thousands of courtesans mounted on elephants, pools of water of the emotion of love; seated on an elephant, the King arrived at the garden, the abode of much shade, resembling Nandana. The elephant of kings dismounted from the elephant's shoulder and entered the garden, like a lion a mountaincave. From afar the King saw there the great muni,
16 66. See I, n. 19. 17 72. See Chap. III.