Book Title: Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 6
Author(s): Hemchandracharya, Helen M Johnson
Publisher: Oriental Research Institute Vadodra
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CHAPTER SEVEN
seat.
be your companion in future. I am going to take initiation." Clever Śrimati, in order to inform her son about that, took a spindle with a bunch of cotton and sat down on a She began to spin and the child asked, "Mother, why have you begun this work suitable for common people?" She said: "Son, your father is going away to be a mendicant. When he has gone, the spindle alone is a refuge for me deprived of a husband."
The child said with words in indistinct whispers from childishness: "I shall tie and keep him a prisoner. How will my father go away?" Saying this, he wound his father's feet with the thread from the spindle, like a little spider with a spider web, his face innocent and gentle. Then he said: Mother, do not be afraid. Be comforted. With his feet tied by me, like an elephant, how can father go away?"
Śrimati's husband thought: Alas! this bond of affection for a child has become a snare for the bird of my mind. From love for the child I will continue as a householder for so many years as there are loops of thread around my feet." When the loops of thread on his feet were counted they proved to be twelve and then he passed twelve years as a householder.
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When the limit of his promise was reached, he, wise, possessed by disgust with existence, thought in the last watch of the night: "I took the vow like a rope in order to leave the pit of worldly existence. As it was taken and given up by me, I am stuck in it (worldly existence) again. In a former birth, the vow was broken only mentally. Nevertheless, I was born in the non-Aryans. What will my status be in future? Be it so. Now I, having undertaken mendicancy, shall cleanse myself by the fire of penance, like a cloth by the cleansing of fire."171
On the morning he talked with his wife Śrīmati, obtained her consent, put on the costume of an ascetic and left the
171 309. Apparently an allusion to asbestos.
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