________________
420
YASASTILAKA AND INDIAN CULTURE
Meanwhile two sages possessing the power of travelling through the air descended from the sky to give religious instruction to the people, and the Cāņdāla approached and entreated them to assign a suitable vow to him. Thereupon one of the sages asked him to fix a rope in the intervening space between the plate of meat and the jar of wine, and said that the momentary abstention from either that would be caused in going from one extremity to the other would constitute a sufficient vow of abstention for him. The Cāņņāla acted accordingly, and after helping himself to the meat, said that he would abstain from it until his return from the other end. He then went towards the wine-jar, drank the wine and died from the effects of poisoning. As a result of the merit accruing even from the momentary abstention from meat, the Cāņdāla was reborn as the chief of the Yakşas in the world of these spirits.
XIII) The following story illustrates the consequences of malevolence : There was a fisherman named Mrgasena in Sirīşagrāma in Avanti. One day he entreated a famous sage to assign a religious vow to him, and he was accordingly advised to refrain from killing his first catch on that particular day. The fisherman cast his net and soon caught a huge fish, but remembering the vow assigned to him, let the fish go after attaching to it a strip of cloth for the purpose of recognition. It so happened that he caught the same fish five times in the course of the day, but on each occasion let it go without any harm. His wife Ghaņķā was furious to see him return home empty-handed in the evening, and as she shut the door against him, he had to pass the night outside, resting his head on the trunk of a tree. Mrgasena was bitten by a snake during the night and found dead in the morning. The wife who was now overwhelmed with grief committed suicide by entering the flames on the funeral pyre.
The story now goes on to narrate the rebirth of Mrgasena. Visvambhara was the reigning king of Viśālā where lived the merchant Guņa pāla, his wife Dhanaśrī and daughter Subandhu. As ill-luck would have it, the king asked the merchant to give his beautiful and accomplished daughter in marriage to the son of the court jester. Afraid of the disgrace resulting from such a marriage as well as the wrath of the king
efusal, Guņapāla fled with his daughter to Kaušāmbi, leaving his wife, who was with child, in the house of his friend Śridatta, a wealthy merchant. The sages Sivagupta and Munigupta happened to see Dhanaśrī in the house of Śrīdatta; and Munigupta having pitied the condition of Dhanaśrī, who was pale and weak and dejected, the other declared that in spite of her present troubles, she would become the mother of a son destined to be a
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
