Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 3

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

Page 309

280
CHAPTER FOUR merchants lived there, great friends of each other, Dhanavasu the one, and Datta the other. Their desire for wealth not being allayed, desirous as thirsty cātakas, 880 they filled carts, wagons, et cetera, with various kinds of merchandise. Always together, they wandered through villages, mines, cities, capital villages, et cetera, for trade, like fathers of poverty. They, like Paramādhārmikas, 881 drove their oxen when they were thirsty, hungry, tired, weak, crippled, lean, suffering from cold, heat, and thirst, with excessive loads, by means of ox-goads, blows with clubs, and twisting their tails. They cut the oxen's swollen backs with knives, and they pierced again the nose-skin when the former hole was split. They did not turn loose the oxen at the right time because of their wish for haste and they themselves ate as they went along, intolerant of delay. They deceived the people with false weights, false measures, false coins, and false descriptions of articles. They deceived everyone, like crafty jackals, and fought each other from desire for one object. The two men, their minds always deluded by false belief, pitiless, overcome by greed, did not even make mention of dharma. So, painful meditation being experienced, they acquired an elephantbirth. For an animal-birth is the result of painful meditation. One day at the tirtha Srīnadi, subject to love and hate, they quarreled together, fought, and died.
They were born as elephants on the bank of Svarņakūlā in the same Airāvata, named Tāmrakalaśa and Käñcanakalaśa. They gradually grew up and with ichor dripping seven-fold,882 they wandered on the bank of the river, tearing down trees. One day as they, lords of herds, wandered, each with his own herd, they saw each other like reflections of their own images. They both ran at each other quickly to kill each other, with blazing anger from the anger of the former birth, like mountains with blazing
330 83. Which live on rain-drops. 881 86. Demons in hell. See I, n. 58. 882 95. See I, n. 359.