Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 2

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

Page 315

290
in punishment, but was gentle as a bhadra-elephant.* For a long time he anointed all the sky with glory and love spread out simultaneously, like a half-and-half mixture of sandal and saffron. A heap of virtues, like a household divinity, was innate in this king, a pleasure-house of the goddess Laksmi.
CHAPTER FOUR
He had a wife, the crest of good wives, Susīmā by name, rivaling a celestial maiden. She, with visible buds in the form of hands, feet, and lips, with flowers in the form of teeth, with branches in the form of arms, looked like a kalpa tree shoot. She walked slowly, her face covered with a veil, looking only at the ground as if devoted to carefulness in walking.488 Her body was adorned with beauty as well as her conduct with modesty, her mind with sincerity as well as her speech with pleasant truth. When she was speaking, because of the very white rays from her teeth she looked like night with streams of moonlight from the moon.
482 25. See I, n. 128.
488 30. 484 38.
Birth (33-38)
Now, the soul of King Aparajita completed a life of thirty-one sägaras in Graiveyaka. On the sixth day of the black half of Magha, the moon being in conjunction with Citra, he fell and descended into the womb of Lady Susīmā. Then Queen Susīmā saw fourteen great dreams indicating the birth of a Tirthakṛt entering her mouth. As the embryo gradually increased in size the Queen had a pregnancy-whim for a couch of lotuses; and it was instantly gratified by goddesses. After nine months, seven and a half days, on the twelfth day of the black half of Kartika, the moon being in Citra, the planets suddenly going to exaltation by retrograde and accelerating motions, the Queen bore a son, red lotus-color, marked by a red lotus.484
432
A play on the doctrinal iryāsamiti.
Padma in Hem. is red lotus,' not ' lotus' in general,