Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 3

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

Page 43

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CHAPTER ONE
Tell me. For ordinary people are not suitable to ask about the best dream.”
The king said, "Queen, your son will be a Balabhadra with extraordinary strength, like a god in beauty." .
In course of time she bore a son, white in color, longarmed, eighty bows tall, like the east bearing the moon. The king held a great festival because a jewel of a son had come, like the cakravartin when the cakra-jewel came. On an auspicious day at an auspicious moon the king named his son Acala with great pomp. Day by day displaying more and more beauty of the body, he grew through the care of the nurses like a tree by means of canals.
Story of Mygāvatā (180–215) When some time had passed after Acala's birth, Queen Bhadrà conceived an embryo like a ketaki 26 conceiving a blossom. At the completed time the king's wife bore a daughter endowed with all the favorable marks, like the Jähnavi bearing a lotus. The king named her Mrgāvati because of her moon-face and her eyes like a young deer's. Going from lap to lap, the gazelle-eyed maiden grew up without difficulties, like a gazelle belonging to ascetics. The nurses looked like pillars of a house with jeweled puppets as they walked in the courtyard with her on their hips. Gradually traversing childhood, she attained youth distinguished by beauty of body, which is a life-giving herb for reviving Smara. Her face was like an earring of the moon under the guise of arched eyebrows; her black and white eyes were like white lotuses with bees. Her beautiful neck was like the stalk of her lotus-face; her hands with straight fingers were like quivers of Kama. Her breasts were like cakravākas 27 of the river of the loveliness of her body; her waist was very small as if from weariness from the weight of her breasts.
86 180. The Pandanus odoratissimus, the screw-pine, a favorite tree in India.
27 188. See I, n. 318.