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head to his feet.*[1] And I will not let him go until I am told to do so by you. And you must say here, in the prison, ' I will deliver the king from the serpent.' And when you come and give me the order, I will let the king go. And when I let him go, he will give you half his kingdom." After he had said this, the snake went and coiled round the king, and placed his three hoods on his head. And the people began to cry out, " Alas ! the king is bitten by a snake." Then the Bodhisattva said, " I will deliver the king from this snake." And the king's servants, having heard this, informed him. Thereupon the king, who was in the grasp of the snake, had the Bodhisattva summoned, and said to him, " If you deliver me from this snake, I will give you half my kingdom, and these my ministers are your guarantees that I will keep my promise." When his ministers heard this, they said,— " Certainly," and then the Bodhisattva said to that snake, " Let the king go at once." Then the snake let the king go, and the king gave half his kingdom to that Bodhisattva, and thus he became prosperous in a moment. And the serpent, as its curse was at an end, became a young hermit, and he told his story in the presence of the court and went back to his hermitage.
" Thus you see that good fortune certainly befalls those of good dispositions. And transgression brings suffering even upon the great. And the mind of women cannot be relied upon, it is not touched even by such a service as rescue from death; so what other benefit can move them ?" When Gomukha had told this tale, he said to the king of Vatsa, " Listen, I will tell you some more stories of fools."
Story of the Buddhist monk who was bitten by a dog.:— There was in a certain Buddhist monastery a Buddhist monk of dull intellect. One day, as he was walking in the high road, he was bitten by a dog on the knee. And when he had been thus bitten, he returned to his monastery, and thus reflected,— " Every body, one after another, will ask me, ' What has happened to your knee? And what a time it will take me to inform them all one by one ! So I will make use of an artifice to let them all know at once." Having thus reflected, he quickly went to the top of the monastery, and taking the stick with which the gong was struck, he sounded the gong. And the mendicant monks, hearing it, came together in astonishment, and said to him, " Why do you without cause sound the gong at the wrong time ?" He answered the mendicants, at the same time shewing them his knee, " The fact is, a dog has bitten my knee, so I called you together, thinking that it would take a long time for me to tell
- ↑ * Cp. the 46th story in Sicilianische Märchen gesammelt von Laura von Gonzenbach, where a snake coils round the throat of a king, and will not let him go, till he promises to marry a girl, whom he had violated.
