Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 3

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

Page 235

206
CHAPTER ONE
ornamented with good conduct. One of them was Kanakasri and the other was Hemamālinī. Kanakasri bore two daughters, like intelligence and beauty, indicated by a dream of two shoots of a kalpa-tree in her lap. At a festival equal to a birth-festival the father and mother gave them the names Kanakalatā and Padmalatā. Hemamālinī bore a daughter, delighting the family, named Padmă, indicated by the sight of a lotus-tendril in a dream. They attained the collection of arts and pure youth, like the manifold śris of the three worlds brought together in one place.
Padma became disgusted with existence because of the presence of the nun Ajitasena and adopted mendicancy fittingly at her feet. One time, with permission of the nun, she performed a penance consisting of one-day fasts. In this there are sixty one-day fasts and two three-day fasts.267 One day when she had duly finished that severe penance, she was going outside on the highway for care of the body. She saw two powerful princes, eager for love, fighting over the courtesan Madanamañjarī. When she had seen them, Padmā reflected: "Oh, there is some beauty of the girl, since they are fighting on her account, see! By the power of this penance may I have such beauty in another birth." She made a nidāna to this effect. She observed a fast at the end, died without confessing her nidāna, and became a very powerful goddess in Saudharmakalpa.
Kanakaśrī wandered through existence, became youa Vidyadhara-king, named Manikundalin, because she had made gifts, et cetera, in the last birth. Kanakalatā and Padmalată, after wandering through existence, because they had practiced the dharma of gifts, et cetera, many times in former births, became Induṣeņa and Binduşena,
267 113. I.e., there was a three-day fast at the beginning and end of the fast and 60 one-day fasts with fast-breaking-days after each fast-day, making a total of 128 days. This fast is also called Karmacaturtha. See Tapavali, p. 109.