"Have you received power over all who go down into the pool?"
"Yes, indeed! I carry off even a bird when it comes down, and I let no one off. You too I will devour, one and all!"
"We shall not allow you to eat us."
"Well, then! drink away!"
"Yes! we shall drink the water too, but we shall not fall into your hands."
"How, then, will you get at the water?"
"You imagine, I suppose, that we must go down to drink. But you are wrong! Each one of us eighty thousand shall take a Naḷa-cane and drink the water of your pond without ever entering it, as easily as one would drink from the hollow stem of a water-plant. And so you will have no power to eat us!"
It was when the Teacher as Buddha had recalled this circumstance that he uttered the first half of the following stanza:
"I saw the marks of feet that had gone down,
I saw no marks of feet that had returned."
(But then he said to the monkeys) —
"We'll drink the water through a reed,"
(And turning to the demon, he added) —
"And yet I'll not become your prey!"
So saying, the Bodisat had a Naḷa-cane brought to him, and appealing in great solemnity to the Ten Great Perfections (generosity, morality, self-denial, wisdom, perseverance, patience, truth, resolution, kindness, and resignation) exercised by him in this and previous births,
