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the water of the best pool. The body relaxes, but not desire; beauty goes, but evil thought does not go; old age appears, not knowledge. Shame on the true constitution of people! Beauty, grace, splendor, body, and propertyeverything in samsara is as unsteady as a drop of water on the tip of kusa grass. Penance only, the essence of voluntary destruction of karma, is the great fruit of creatures' bodies which perish today or tomorrow."
SANATKUMĀRACAKRICARITRA
The king, in whom the feeling of disgust with existence had been produced by these reflections, wishing to adopt mendicancy himself, established his son in the kingdom. He went to the garden and took penance, which is most important in the giving up of everything censurable, from Vinayandhara with reverence. As he, observing the great vows, practicing the uttaraguņas, wandered from village to village, his mind intent on tranquillity, his whole kingdom followed him from the bond of deep affection, like a herd of elephants the leader of the herd. When they had attended him who was free from passions, indifferent, free from affection, free from possessions, for six months, they returned gradually.
One day, after he had fasted for two days, he entered a compound to break his fast and received and ate millet and boiled rice with goat's butter-milk. 254 From breaking his fast again in the same way after a two-day fast, his diseases increased as if from an unsatisfied pregnancywhim. Virtuous-minded, he endured seven diseasesitch, consumption, fever, asthma, want of appetite, 255 stomach-ache, and pain in the eyes-for seven hundred
254 383. According to Dutt, p. 282, takra is butter-milk with part of water; but he also uses it as the name of butter-milk in general.
255 385. śvāsāruci-aruci. Tawney (Kathakośa, p. 36) says that his Sanskrit in his parallel passage is annaruci, which would be appetite, hunger.' Leumann interprets this as 'morbid appetite,' as does Meyer the bhattacchanda of the Mähäräṣṭri version. But the PH takes this bhattacchanda to be bhaktäcchanda.
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