decease is not yet healed. Pray do not rub it open afresh with the salt of this new assault of grief.
5. Even now the wound is still open which was inflicted on our minds by the death of our father. Oh! you must retract your resolution, wise brother, you must not strew salt on our wound.
6. 'Or, if indeed you are convinced that attachment to the house is unfit, or that the happiness of the forest-life is the road to salvation, why is it that you desire to depart for the forest alone, leaving us in this house destitute of our protector?
'For this reason, the state of life which is yours, that will be ours, too. We too will renounce the world.'
The Bodhisattva answered:
7. People who have not familiarised themselves with Detachment cannot but follow after worldly desires. As a rule they look upon it as the same thing to give up the world or to fall over a precipice. Thus considering, I restrained myself and did not exhort you to adopt the homeless life, though knowing the difference between both states. But if my choice please you too, why, let us abandon our home!! And so all seven brothers, with their sister as the eighth, gave up their wealthy estate and precious goods, took leave of their weeping friends, kinsmen and relations, and resorted to the state of homeless ascetics. And with them, out of affection also one comrade, one male, and one female servant set out for the forest.
In a certain place in the forest there was a large lake of pure, blue water. It exhibited a resplendent fiery beauty, when its lotus-beds were expanded, and offered a gay aspect, when its groups of waterlilies disclosed their calyxes[1]; swarms of bees were always humming there. On the shore of that lake they built as many huts of leaves as they numbered, one for
- ↑ The former happened at daytime, the latter in the nights bright with moonshine.
