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THE QUESTIONS OF KING MILINDA. IV, 4, 15.
the bones are broken, and the body becomes like a heap of straw)-or to be anointed with boiling oil, or to be eaten by dogs, or to be impaled alive, or to be beheaded. Such and such, O king, are the manifold and various pains which a being caught in the whirlpool of births and rebirths has to endure. Just, O king, as the water rained down upon the Himalaya mountain Aows, in its course along the Ganges, through and over rocks and pebbles and gravel, whirlpools and eddies and rapids !, and the stumps and branches of trees which obstruct and oppose its passage,-just so has each being caught in the succession of births and rebirths to endure such and such manifold and various pains. Full of pain, then, is the continual succession of rebirths, a joy is it when that succession ends. And it was in pointing out the advantage of that end, the disaster involved in that succession, that the Blessed One, great king, instigated us to get beyond birth, and old age, and disease, and death by the realisation of the final end of that succession of rebirths. This is the sense, O king, which led the Blessed One to instigate us (to put an end to life).
Very good, Nagasena! Well solved is the puzzle (I put), well set forth are the reasons (you alleged). That is so, and I accept it as you say.'
[Here ends the problem as to suicide.]
not understood in the fifth century A. D.; and was probably therefore unintelligible also, at least in part, to our author.
1 Umika-vanka-ka dika. I don't pretend to understand this last word. Dr. Morris, at p. 92 of the 'Pâli Text Society's Journal' for 1884, suggests velika. Perhaps it was simply adika after all, with or without m euphonic.
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