you like, and may your awaking be glad! I stay here, keeping guard over you. But when the Great Being, in consequence of his fatigue, had fallen asleep, he conceived wicked thoughts within his mind.
17. 'Roots to be obtained with hard effort or forestfruits offered by chance are my livelihood here. How can my emaciated body sustain life by them ? how much less, recover its strength ?
18. ‘And how shall I succeed in traversing this wilderness hard to pass, if I am infirm ? . Yet, in the body of this ape I should have food amply sufficient to get out of this troublesome wilderness.
19. ‘Although he has done good to me, I may feed on him, I may, for he has been created such a being. I may, for here the rules given for times of distress[1] are applicable, to be sure. For this reason I have to get my provisions from his body.
20. ‘But I am only able to kill him while he is sleeping the profound and quiet sleep of trustfulness. For if he were to be attacked in open fight, even a lion would not be assured of victory.
'Therefore, there is no time to lose now. Having thus made up his mind, that scoundrel, troubled in his thoughts by sinful lust which had destroyed within him his gratitude, his consciousness of the moral precepts, and even his tender innate feeling of compassion, not minding his great weakness of body, and listening only to his extreme desire to perform that vile action, took a stone, and made it fall straight down on the head of the great ape.
21, 22. But, being sent by a hand trembling with weakness and hastily, because of his great cupidity, that stone, flung with the desire of sending the monkey to the complete sleep (of death), destroyed his sleep. It did not strike him with its whole weight, so that it did not dash his head to pieces; it only bruised it with one of its edges, and fell down on the earth with a thundering noise.
- ↑ The so-called âpaddharma, cp. stanza 8 of Story XII.
